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If you want to see global warming in action, head to the Arctic. The seasonal shrinking of the sea ice over the North Pole is one of the most visible symptoms of the gradual warming of the planet. Every winter, Arctic ice builds up in the polar darkness, and then in the summer, it melts. [...]
Oh Greenpeace. Only PETA outshines you in the shameless publicity stunt department, and yet here I am, falling for your tricks, because this week your eco-warriors have attached themselves — literally — to a topic I can’t resist: the quest to find oil in the Arctic. At 3AM on May 29, a Greenpeace team left [...]
For all its remoteness, the North Pole generates a lot of controversy. In 1909, the American admiral Robert Peary reported that he successfully reached the geographic North Pole, a feat of navigation that is now widely disputed. Nearly a century later, another expedition to the remote top of the globe caused a stir when Russian [...]
One of the most pressing predictions that must be made in climate science concerns the rate of polar melting. As they warm—and the Arctic and Antarctic regions have heated up faster than most of the rest of the planet—the glaciers of Greenland and Antarctica are melting and flowing into the ocean, which then raises sea [...]
Here’s an interesting piece of news from Tim Webb at the Guardian about Greenland’s latest pitch to the oil industry: pay us $2 billion dollars, and then you can drill. Greenland — which is divided on whether the recent interest of global companies in its oil and gas resources is a blessing or a curse [...]
It’s one of the most pressing questions facing climate scientists today: how vulnerable are the vast ice caps on Greenland and Antarctica to rising temperatures? An unfathomable amount of ice is stored on those two land masses, and as that ice melts and flows into the oceans, global sea levels rise—if all the ice on [...]
Okay, I know it’s weird to keep writing about Greenland from Hong Kong, but what can I say. Greenland’s constantly shifting landscape is a busy place. The latest spasm of geography on the world’s largest island was recorded last week, when between July 6 and 7, scientists monitoring satellite images of Jakobshavn Isbrae glacier in [...]
While the world can’t take its eyes off the slow motion train wreck in the Gulf, environmentalists and politicians in more northerly climes are getting increasingly cold feet about plans for offshore drilling in their own icy waters. Canada’s Environment Minister Jim Prentice plans to station a supervisor on an upcoming drilling project scheduled to [...]
