Background Articles

Thriving communities of red algae are doing something nefarious to the world's ice sheets: melting them more quickly.

A new study based on analysis of satellite images shows how much snow cover Switzerland has lost in the last 20 years. Losing all the glaciers in Switzerland is not that far away.

The permafrost beneath certain lakes is thawing rapidly, which will release a significant amount of methane into the atmosphere.

For millennia, ecosystems in Greenland and throughout the Arctic have been regulated by seasonal changes that govern the greening of vegetation and the migration and reproduction of animals. But a rapidly warming climate and disappearing sea ice are upending that finely tuned balance.

From Longyearbyen to Kiribati, Bangladesh and California. Author Teresa Grøtan has collected young people's everyday life with climate change in the book "Before the Island Sink."

From floods to fires, drought to coastal erosion, climate change is already having an impact on Canada's communities, landscapes and wildlife

Culturally vital, ecologically unique, and economically valuable, the yellow cedar’s fate is closely tied to snow

A study of more than 1,700 glaciers on northern Ellesmere Island found six per cent of ice coverage disappeared between 1999 and 2015

The divide between Atlantic and Arctic isn’t just geographical, it’s physical. And the physics are changing.

Over 30 years the world’s annual temperature has warmed nearly 1 degree according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

It’s well established that Arctic ice is changing in dramatic ways. As the climate warms, ice coverage is decreasing, the amount of multiyear ice has gone down significantly and in

Warmer temperatures and declining sea ice pulls foreign animals and plants to the Arctic, with drastic consequences for these sensitive ecosystems.

Polar bears live in a remote and inhospitable environment far from most human settlements. For most biologists, opportunities to observe these animals are fleeting. In fact, scientists' main resources for understanding basic behaviors of polar bears on sea ice are observations of polar bear behavior and foraging rates made by Canadian biologist Ian Stirling more than 40 years ago, combined with local traditional knowledge from Arctic indigenous peoples.

Average number of days with heavy rain or snow across Canada has been outside norm since spring 2013

A team of scientists presented data on Tuesday suggesting that even as the state of Alaska has warmed up extremely rapidly in recent years, snowfall in the iconic Denali National Park has increased dramatically during the era of human-driven global warming.

On a remote Alaskan sandbar, under the watchful eye of a devoted scientist for more than four decades, climate change is forcing a colony of seabirds into a real-time race: evolve or go extinct.

A study of rock avalanches in the western part of Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve found that the likelihood of large slides covering about 2 square miles has at least doubled in the last five years.

Climate warming is likely to bring more episodes of heavy rain, above-freezing winter thaws and scorching hot summer days in the coming decades, says a study by scientists at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Warm periods are bringing the temperature up by as much as 30 C in the middle of winter