Late one August evening three summers ago in Fønfjord, a fifty-mile-long channel in Scoresby Sound, East Greenland, two narwhals were netted by local hunters and towed into the shallow waters off Hjørnedal, a small field station. The Arctic night a thousand or so miles from the North Pole is not entirely dark in late summer, but the Hjørnedal team—Inuit narwhal hunters collaborating with a group of researchers—needed headlamps. As quickly as they could, they untangled the narwhals and fitted each with a heart-rate monitor, a satellite transmitter, and a listening device called an Acousonde. The misshapen right pectoral fin and scars on the mottled many-shades-of-gray skin of one narwhal looked familiar. The team recognized Nemo, a young male with a modest thirty-two-inch tusk, first caught in 2014.

Construction of new ice-class vessels will aid in launching year-round navigation in the Northern Sea Route (NSR) within a five-year period, Russia’s Minister for the Development of the Far East and Arctic Aleksey Chekunov said. “The range of work of the NSR is constantly growing. I think we will sail all year round within a horizon of five years. The icebreaker ‘Leader’ and other new ice-class vessels should help us in this,” the minister said in an interview with Russian business daily RBK.

The time of COVID-19 has been highly restrictive for the ethnographic field research, including the socio-cultural study of the pandemic itself. Yet, among those at other recent conferences, numerous exchanges at the 2021 International Congress of Arctic Social Sciences and the annual meeting of the Alaska Anthropological Association show that the Arctic research community has been prompt and prolific in documenting the pandemic-era experiences in the Circumpolar North.

Alaska Chadux̂ Network and the North American Marine Environment Protection Association are co-sponsoring a free collaborative virtual seminar that will focus on maritime challenges currently being faced in the U.S. Arctic. The 3-hour informative event will address a series of topics including a keynote address focusing on the role of the U.S. Arctic in national policies; current issues being confronted by stakeholders in the region; and future challenges. This unique event will bring together expert insight from across the maritime sector, arctic specialists, and government officials. Registration is now open.

In this talk, Prof. Andrew Stuhl will examine the state of knowledge that Pimlott experienced as a constitutive element of energy frontiers, environmental regimes, and struggles for Indigenous rights in the late twentieth-century Arctic. This event is part of the Arctic Environmental Humanities Workshop Series and is hosted by The Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future at Boston University’s Pardee School of Global Studies and the Scott Polar Research Institute at the University of Cambridge.

The annual Arctic Circle Assembly is the largest annual international gathering on the Arctic, attended by more than 2000 participants from 60 countries. It is attended by heads of states and governments, ministers, members of parliaments, officials, experts, scientists, entrepreneurs, business leaders, indigenous representatives, environmentalists, students, activists and others from the growing international community of partners and participants interested in the future of the Arctic.

For the most up-to-date COVID information, please see the the US Embassy in Reykjavik's COVID page: here.

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.

The Maritime Risk Symposium is an annual three-day conference in which government and maritime industry leaders, port representatives, researchers, and solution providers convene to examine current and emerging threats to maritime security. Government agencies, commercial entities, institutions of research, and higher education come together to discuss various threats, challenges, and risks to international and domestic maritime sectors.

The European Commission and the European External Action Service will organize a high-level EU Arctic Forum and the Annual Arctic Indigenous Peoples’ Dialogue. The EU Arctic Forum will bring together key Arctic players and stakeholders to assess recent developments in the region and discuss challenges ahead. The event will provide a strategic outlook for the updated EU Arctic policy and delve into topics that are of particular significance for the Arctic’s inhabitants.

The New England Arctic Network (NEAN) will host its 2021 meeting at the University of New England in Portland, Maine. Additional information will be published soon. 

Arctic Symposium 2021 continues momentum in Arctic defense and security collaboration established in prior ALCOM-hosted events. AAS21 seeks to address the challenges faced by the U.S. military and our allies and partners in understanding and responding to our respective national interests. AAS21 is planned and organized by the Arctic Domain Awareness Center at the University of Alaska Anchorage (UAA) in support and in compliance to guidance from Alaskan Command (ALCOM) Staff and Commander. More information available soon.

Hosted entirely online the ArcticNet Virtual Annual Scientific Meeting 2021 (ASM2021) is a hub for Arctic research in Canada. The ASM2021 brings together researchers from the natural, health, and social sciences to meet the challenges and opportunities of a rapidly changing Arctic region, shaped by climate change and modernization. This conference will push the boundaries of our collective understanding of the Arctic and strengthen our ability to address the Arctic issues of today and tomorrow.

The National Academies’ Polar Research Board is convening the following session at the Fall AGU meeting.

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.