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.

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.

Qaiyaan Harcharek is the harpooner of his Iñupiaq whaling crew in Utgiagvik, the northernmost city in Alaska. “I’ve been blessed with nine whales,” he said, which is no small feat. Bowhead whales can grow up to 60 feet long and weigh 75 to 100 tons. To land one requires extensive skill, deep-rooted relationships with whales and the Arctic environment, and cooperation between all crew members. The Iñupiat have for generations hunted bowhead whales every spring and fall. “We’re whalers. It’s who we are as a people and it’s what has sustained us to thrive in this harsh environment for thousands of years,” Harcharek said. In Alaska’s vast North Slope Borough, most of the 9,700 residents are Iñupiat, and while bowheads are not an endangered whale species, they do face environmental and human-caused threats to their ongoing recovery.

In this edition of Wilson Center NOW we are joined by the Polar Institute’s Michaela Stith, Evan Bloom, and Ambassador David Balton. They recap the just-concluded Arctic Council Ministerial Meeting in Reykjavík. They also discuss what lies ahead for the organization and the region with the passing of the Council’s two-year chairmanship from Iceland to Russia. This year marks the 25th anniversary of the Council. 

During the summer of 2021, the village of Napakiak will continue work to move the homes and structures that are most threatened by river erosion. Napakiak has created a comprehensive 50-year plan to navigate the complicated process of relocating its community, which some say is the first of its kind. This could provide a blueprint for other communities threatened by climate change.

Scientists have uncovered a summertime climate pattern in and around the Arctic that could drive co-occurrences of European heatwaves and large-scale wildfires with air pollution over Siberia and subpolar North America. In recent years in summer, there have often been extremely high temperatures over Europe, including heatwaves and active wildfires in and around the Arctic such as Siberia and subpolar North America (Alaska and Canada), which have caused widespread air pollution. For instance, in July 2019, significant Alaskan wildfires were detected by satellites. The recent unusual climate phenomena are of immense concern to many people living in these regions.

For more than 10 years, climate scientists have explored a provocative idea: As Arctic sea ice melts and the polar atmosphere warms, the swirling winds that confine cold Arctic air could weaken, letting it spill farther south. But this idea has long faced skepticism from many atmospheric scientists. Now, the most comprehensive modeling investigation into this link has delivered the heaviest blow yet: Even after the massive sea ice loss expected by midcentury, the polar jet stream will only weaken by tiny amounts—at most only 10% of its natural swings.

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.