Live-Streamed Underwater Dives Will Offer Watery Window on Arctic Life. A pair of Arctic ocean dives organized by two UVic alumni will be broadcast live across Canada next weekend, marking a national first. The Fish Eye Project, founded by University of Victoria education graduate Mike Irvine and Maeva Gauthier, now an oceanography PhD candidate at the university, is organizing the Aug. 27 dives. Other participating groups include the UVic-led Ocean Networks, Polar Knowledge Canada, Ocean Wise, and Canada C3, a Canada 150 project featuring an icebreaker traveling from Toronto to Victoria via the Northwest Passage. Times Colonist

 

Chinese Icebreaker Navigates Across Central Arctic. It is not known what specific research the vessel is doing in the Norwegian Sea. The vessel's path can be tracked via the portal MarineTraffic.com. There are 96 crew members on board, including teams of Arctic and oceanographic researchers. This is the eight Arctic expedition with «Xue Long» (Snow Dragon), but the first time the icebreaking research vessel attempts to sail the Arctic rim, China's state CGTN channel reports. Circumnavigating the Arctic is expected to take 83 days and the voyage spent the two first weeks of August sailing north from the Bering Strait towards the North Pole. The Barents Observer

 

Geologists Search for Earth's Earliest Life Forms in Nunavut. More than a billion years ago, a planet-changing volcanic eruption fossilized some of Earth's first organisms in lava flows stretching across North America's Arctic landmass. Now, a team of scientists returning from a canoe trip down the Coppermine River have collected a trove of rock samples which they think might put Canada's North on the map for preserving the remains of some of Earth's earliest life. Nunatsiaq Online

Melting Sea Ice Forces Walruses Ashore Earliest Gathering Yet Observed. The increasing rate of ice melt in the Arctic Circle has again driven a horde of Pacific walruses ashore on an island off the northwest coast of Alaska, reports the Associated Press. But this year, the gathering of some 2,000 creatures has taken place earlier than ever before observed. The so-called "haulout"-a gathering of walruses on land-took place on the shores near Point Lay, a small, Iñupiaq community on the northwest coast of Alaska, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's Alaska Division says in a statement. These walruses usually rest atop floating ice sheets to recuperate between dives in the Chukchi Sea while on the hunt for their favorite foods, which include clams, worms and other small ocean critters. But when ice isn't available-as has increasingly been the case in the Arctic-the creatures head to land, reports Jerzy Shedlock of the Alaska Dispatch News. Smithsonian Mag

 

Weather by the Numbers: Mosquitoes in the Arctic, a Sunless Summer in Quebec and Devastation in Sierra Leone. ... The world shares a universal dislike of mosquitoes. At worst, they are the conveyors of deadly disease. At best, well, there is no at best. But while most of us have come to accept a cohabitation with the annoying insects, the Arctic is experiencing a mosquito boom. New research suggests that a 2 degree Celsius rise in the average Arctic temperature would increase the mosquito population by 53 percent. That's bad news for any mammals that live in the Arctic region, where the insects tend to emerge en masse and attack by the thousands... The Washington Post

 

Flying to the North Pole in an Airship Was Easy. Returning Wouldn't be so Easy. In the Arctic summer, the sun shines even at midnight. So it was bright as the airship Italia approached the geographic North Pole, motoring at 3,000 feet above the endless pack ice. Below the ship, a thick bank of fog obscured the frozen Arctic Ocean, but up here the sky was blue, cloudless. A pair of officers used a sextant and the sun to measure the Italia's position as they covered the final miles, and when they'd reached 90 degrees north, where the planet's longitude lines converge at the pole, the helmsman began a slow, lazy circle around their goal. General Umberto Nobile, the airship's commander, gave the order to dive under the fog, and soon the airmen could see the blank ice, fewer than 500 feet below them. They had made it. Smithsonian Mag