Arctic, features and articles | Educational Science

Jan 16, 2017

New Icy Island Forms as Arctic Glacier Retreats

As Coronation Glacier on Canada's Baffin Island retreats, it has left behind a new island. The island, detected with satellite imagery, is made of loose dirt and rocks deposited by the slow-moving river of ice. Typically, a glacial island like this will erode away after the glacier stops feeding it...

Mar 30, 2017

Why Russia Gave up Alaska, America's Gateway to the Arctic

One hundred and fifty years ago, on March 30, 1867, U.S. Secretary of State William H. Seward and Russian envoy Baron Edouard de Stoeckl signed the Treaty of Cession. With a stroke of a pen, Tsar Alexander II had ceded Alaska, his country's last remaining foothold in North America, to...

Jun 1, 2017

Huge Underwater Eruptions Blasted Craters into Arctic Seafloor

Craters as wide as 12 city blocks on the Arctic seafloor were put there by giant eruptions of underground methane gas. Some of these craters had been discovered in the early 1990s, but only now have scientists mapped the features in detail. Researchers have discovered that there are many more...

Jul 19, 2018

Arctic Circle Burns As Record Heat Broils Northern Europe

An intense heat wave is fueling wildfires across an enormous swath of northern Europe, with at least 11 fires raging within the Arctic Circle, reported The Guardian. Sweden is the worst-hit country, with at least 40 fires burning as of Wednesday, Time reported. Multiple communities have been evacuated, and thousands...

Oct 20, 2018

Mystery of Mercury Levels in Arctic Animals Gets Solved

In the Canadian Arctic, a mystery has troubled scientists and local communities for decades: Why do marine animals in the western Arctic have higher mercury levels than those in the east? The trend is seen throughout the food web, from the tiny zooplankton that drift along ocean currents to large...

Mar 7, 2019

The Melting Arctic Is Covering Itself in a Warm Layer of Clouds

BOSTON — The Arctic is melting. The first ice-free summer is coming. The whole melting process is speeding up the warming of the entire Earth. And every autumn, a layer of extra clouds are forming over the ice-thinning Arctic that — researchers now believe — are speeding that melting up....

Feb 5, 2020

Arctic sinkholes open in a flash after permafrost melt

Arctic permafrost can thaw so quickly that it triggers landslides, drowns forests and opens gaping sinkholes. This rapid melt, described in a new study, can dramatically reshape the Arctic landscape in just a few months. Fast-melting permafrost is also more widespread than once thought. About 20% of the Arctic's permafrost...

Jul 8, 2020

The Arctic Circle: Polar portal to the Arctic

The Arctic Circle is an imaginary line of latitude that circles Earth's northernmost end. Not to be confused with it's colder, Southern Hemisphere counterpart known as the Antarctic Circle, the Arctic Circle is located approximately 66.5 degrees north of the equator (the exact coordinates vary slightly depending on Earth's axial...

Aug 17, 2020

Trump administration to approve Arctic wildlife refuge for oil and gas drilling

The Trump administration announced today (Aug. 17) that it plans to open up part of Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), a 19 million acre (7.7 million hectares) refuge about the size of South Carolina, to oil and gas leasing — a move that paves the way for drilling in...

Apr 27, 2021

Arctic sponges crawl around the seafloor and leave bizarre brown trails to prove it

Scientists have recorded the first evidence of deep-sea sponges crawling around on the seafloor, after snapping photos of bizarre brown tracks left behind by the surprisingly mobile creatures in the Arctic. Sponges are one of the oldest animal groups found on Earth, dating back around 600 million years to the...

Jun 7, 2021

24,000-year-old 'zombies' revived and cloned from Arctic permafrost

Tiny zombies that were frozen in Arctic permafrost for 24,000 years were recently brought back to life and have produced clones in a lab in Russia. These hardy creatures are bdelloid rotifers, or wheel animals, so-named for the wheel-like ring of tiny hairs that circle their mouths. Rotifers are multicellular...

Oct 1, 2021

Russian expedition finds evidence of northernmost Stone Age hunters above the Arctic Circle

Ancient cut marks on mammoth bones unearthed on a remote island in the frozen extremes of Siberia are the northernmost evidence of Paleolithic humans ever found, according to archaeologists. The bones from the woolly mammoth skeleton, dated to about 26,000 years ago, were excavated this summer by a Russian expedition...

Mar 17, 2022

Sinkholes as big as a skyscraper and as wide as a city street open up in the Arctic seafloor

Giant sinkholes — one of which could devour an entire city block holding six-story buildings — are appearing along the Arctic seafloor, as submerged permafrost thaws and disturbs the area, scientists have discovered. But even though human-caused climate change is increasing the average temperatures in the Arctic, the thawing permafrost...

Sep 8, 2022

Giant viruses are infecting algae in a floating lake in the Arctic

Giant viruses have been discovered infecting microscopic algae in a rare lake in the Arctic Ocean, a new study finds. The Milne Fiord epishelf lake is a body of fresh water that sits on top of seawater less than 500 miles (800 kilometers) from the North Pole. Researchers studying the...

Sep 13, 2022

Arctic 'ghost island' that vanished may have actually been a dirty iceberg

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. In 2021, an expedition off the icy northern Greenland coast spotted what appeared to be a previously uncharted island. It was small and gravelly, and it was declared a contender for the title of...