A PhD student has received a prestigious award for her work studying belugas in the Northwest Territories and Nunavut. Enooyaq Sudlovenick, who was raised on Baffin Island, Nunavut, is one of the 2021 recipients of the Weston Family Award in Northern Research. Sudlovenick, who studies at the University of Manitoba, looks in-depth at the health of beluga populations through the lenses of both Inuit knowledge, or Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit, and western science.

Polar bears could be transported to the Antarctic, but they would almost certainly destroy the wildlife that is currently there and then die out themselves. In the Antarctic, penguins breed in large numbers and have no land-based predators. If the penguins weren’t at sea, polar bears would find an all-you-can-eat buffet that they would enjoy until it was wiped out.

With the launch of a Soyuz rocket in eastern Russia on July 1, Nunavut residents may get access to faster, more reliable internet speeds by the end of the year. OneWeb, a low-earth-orbit satellite communications company, plans to launch 36 satellites from the Vostochny Cosmodrome in eastern Russia. These satellites will join 216 others the company already has already in orbit, allowing for it to provide service to all regions north of 50 degrees latitude.

The Government of Nunavut is hosting a leadership forum in August to build capacity among Nunavummiut women. The GN’s department of Family Services is hosting the four-day event with funding provided through the federal government’s Women and Gender Equality Canada department. The forum aims to empower Nunavut’s women and girls using traditional knowledge, skills, and their roles as natural leaders.

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.