Arrayed across a plateau on an island in the high Norwegian Arctic, the 100 geodesic domes of the Svalbard Satellite Station look like abstract mushrooms sprouting from the snowy landscape. From outside, there seems to be little going on. But each dome shelters a dish antenna, that whirs to life throughout the day and night, precisely aiming at satellites as they rise above the horizon and staying locked onto them as they arc across the sky. In the minutes before the satellite dips below the opposite horizon, software commands may be sent up and data is almost certainly sent down.

The U.S. Senate voted, in a unanimous voice vote, to confirm world-renowned scientist Dr. Eric Lander to become the 11th Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) – and the first in U.S. history to serve in the President’s Cabinet. Dr. Lander will also serve as the President’s Science Advisor. “America’s future depends on science and technology like never before,” said Dr. Eric Lander. “In elevating OSTP to the Cabinet, President Biden made clear that science and technology will be central to solving the nation’s most urgent challenges.”

University researchers have helped secure £13million for an Arctic research project that will track the rapidly changing fortunes of the frozen north. The Arctic is on the frontline of global climate change, warming at twice the speed of the rest of the world. Last year alone saw record summer temperatures in Siberia, wildfires rage across sensitive northern tundra and Arctic sea ice shrunk to its smallest ever extent.

Ural blocking (UB), a persistent and large-scale anticyclone around the Ural Mountains, is intimately tied to the cold surges in the Eurasian mid-latitudes. A quasi-stationary and long-lived UB usually leads to extreme cold weather over mid-latitude Eurasia. Westward-shifting and short-lived UBs are found in the recent winters with extreme low sea ice conditions over the Barents-Kara Seas (BKS), which is opposite to previous notions.

Didn’t have time to follow the live event? The Arctic Institute brings you highlights from a busy Ministerial week and quotes from Arctic States’ officials. Last week, the Arctic Council’s journey toward a sustainable Arctic made its final stop to Harpa in Reykjavik (and online) for its 12th Ministerial Meeting concluding the Icelandic chairmanship (2019-2021). Although most media headlines had frantically focused on the “Russian take-over of the Arctic Council” in the lead up to the event, this year’s ministerial meeting brought back some much needed normalcy to the Arctic Council after an eventful 2019 Ministerial Meeting in Rovaniemi.

ADAC will conduct the Center's Program Year 7 Annual meeting to focus on U.S. Coast Guard Project Champions, key stakeholders and the community of Arctic science and technology researchers. Included in the Program Year 7 Annual meeting are planned guest speakers from HQ U.S. Coast Guard, DHS S&T and senior Arctic Research leadership in Washington D.C.

IARPC has released a draft of the next five-year Arctic Research Plan, which will span from 2022-2026. We are now asking the public to comment on the draft plan by June 11, 2021. To provide additional information about the draft plan contents and development, the Interagency Arctic Research Policy Committee is hosting a series of one-hour information sessions.

Join IARPC on Thursday, June 3 at 9am AKT / 1pm ET for a webinar with Dr. Sarah Aarons, Assistant Professor at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Aarons will provide a brief introduction to the historical context of colonialism in the Arctic, focused on Alaska, and its relationship to climate change impacts on Arctic Indigenous Peoples. For researchers working in the Arctic, this webinar will provide insight into the ways that relationships, resource extraction, compensation, and infrastructure building have been predominantly one-sided, and how climate change is now impacting Indigenous communities.

For the first time, a Regional Conference on Permafrost will be combined with the bi-annual 19th International Conference on Cold Regions Engineering. This conference is hosted by the US Permafrost Association, the American Society of Civil Engineers, the International Permafrost Association, the Permafrost Young Researchers Network, and the University of Colorado Boulder. A complete list of planned sessions is available here.

Organizers announce, that due to the coronavirus outbreak, the 2nd Symposium on Polar Microbes and Viruses has been postponed to 2022. This symposium will bring together molecular microbial ecologists specializing in different organism groups to share our latest results and discuss methodological problems, as well as future prospects in the field, including practical international collaborations. The environmental focus will be on cryospheric environments including sea ice, glaciers, ice sheets, and permafrost, but excellent research in other polar environments is also invited. The methods to be discussed will focus on 'omics' techniques, ranging from single cells to metagenomes, but research using additional methods is encouraged as well.