This year’s fire season in the Arctic started with intense activity in western Siberia and Canada, and a below-average number of blazes in eastern Siberia. The boreal fire season, which typically runs from May to October, started earlier this year with the first blazes recorded in April, according to a report by the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service. Europe’s Earth observation agency registers the daily number of incidents and total estimated emissions using satellites.

During the industrial whaling period in the 20th century, over a million blue whales and fin whales were removed from the world’s oceans. Populations are recovering, but these giants are still classified as Endangered and Vulnerable, respectively, on the IUCN’s Red List of Threatened Species. Current threats include entanglement in fishing gear, ship strikes, underwater noise, climate-change-induced alterations of ecosystems, and pollution. Little is known about pollutant exposure of these animals, but they are likely exposed to a wide variety of chemicals during their cycles of movement across ocean basins. In addition, the whales’ long life-span and their potentially limited ability to transform pollutants into a form that can be excreted from the body may exacerbate the problem.

A new study documents the newly named Bering Transitory Archipelago and then points to how, when and where the first Americans may have crossed. The authors' stepping-stones hypothesis depends on scores of islands that emerged during the last ice age as sea level fell when ocean waters were locked in glaciers and later rose when ice sheets melted.

Fiber-optic cables usually make us think of ultra-fast internet — or maybe the irritation of new installation works digging up the pavement. But there are now such cables snaking their way through the center of the planet’s second largest body of ice, the Greenland ice sheet. Fiber-optic technologies are allowing us to monitor the internal structure of glaciers in unprecedented levels of detail. In our new study, we show how fiber-optics are offering extraordinary new insight into how ice sheets evolve — and how the movement of Greenland’s glaciers is far more complicated than previously thought.

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.