Background Articles

Four Dall sheep from the Talkeetna Mountains and two Kenai Peninsula mountain goats just made unfortunate Alaska history.

The animals became the state's first wild sheep and goats to test positive for a pathogen known as Movi that has led to deadly outbreaks among bighorn sheep in the Lower 48 and is triggering calls for restrictions on domestic livestock here.

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

Creamy jasmine wildflowers once common in the Colorado high country may be vanishing as climate change brings warmer and drier conditions.

Reductions in sea ice in the Arctic have a clear impact on animals such as polar bears that rely on frozen surfaces for feeding, mating and migrating. But sea ice loss is changing Arctic habitat and affecting other species in more indirect ways, new research finds.

Late last year one of the world’s largest credit rating agencies announced that climate change would have an economic impact on the U.S.

The initial results represent 330 participants from six communities. Around 98 per cent of participants had mercury levels below the health guidance value - a baseline to assess health risks.

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.

After kneeling in defrosted marine mammal goo ... doctors treated me for a seal finger infection," Peterson wrote. Seal finger is a bacterial infection that hunters contract from handling the body parts of seals. The only seals Peterson had handled were those in the log cabin. Those seals had been frozen in permafrost for decades.

A scientific paper published recently hints at how increasing winter rainfall will affect the Arctic muskox. An N.W.T. biologist says winter rain isn't good for the mammal, but it's actually warmer summers that could prove detrimental.

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

A new study has uncovered previously unknown effects of rain-on-snow events, winter precipitation and ice tidal surges on the muskoxen.

Researchers reveal why Arctic sea ice began to melt in the middle of winter two years ago -- and that the increased melting of ice in summer is linked to recurring periods of fair weather.

Oversight of fish farming companies is lacking according to ecologist Cristian Gallo of the Westfjords Natural History Institute.

The winter season of 2016-2017 proved to be the fifth warmest on record for Georgia, sparking an unusually large number of insects during the following warm months.

This is not the first time the village of Chefornak has faced the threat of erosion and flooding, but relocating won’t be as easy as it was last time.

Climate change may be enabling beavers to move deeper into the Arctic. And as they move, they magnify climate change’s effects.

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.

The warmth of the Bering Sea in 2016 was unprecedented in the historical record, and the warmth of the GOA nearly so. The FAR values Fig. 8.2. Normalized anomalies of (a) heat content and (b) SSTs for the present (black) and preindustrial (blue) climate of the GOA (circle and plus) and Bering Sea (triangle and x) regions from the five model ensembles. Anomalies exceeding 2016 value are in red (shapes as indicated), and the ensemble/region means are shown by the solid lines. Mean probability distributions (%) of (c) heat content and (d) SSTs from the model ensembles; solid (open) circles indicate present (preindustrial) climate for the GOA (blue) and Bering Sea (red). Spread of individual models is shown by the smaller, corresponding open/closed circles. Dashed vertical lines show the 2016 anomalies: GOA (blue), Bering Sea (red). AMERICAN METEOROLOGICAL SOCIETY JANUARY 2018 | S43 based on an ensemble of five global climate models indicate that the 2016 warm ocean anomalies cannot be explained without anthropogenic climate warming, although the region’s large internal variability was also a contributing factor (Fig. 8.1 and online supplement material). A strong El Niño with a positive PDO (warm) phase, together with preconditioning of the waters during 2014/15 and the anomalous atmospheric circulation of early 2016, made for a “perfect storm” of marine heating around Alaska. Both anthropogenic forcing and internal variability were necessary for the extreme warmth of the subarctic seas. Our conclusions are consistent with and extend previous findings concerning the 2014 warm SST anomalies in the northeast Pacific (Weller et al. 2015). Additionally, the trajectory of the present climate with RCP8.5 indicates that SST and HC extreme anomalies like 2016 will become common in the coming decades. Given the many impacts of the 2016 anomaly, the future climate projected here will result in a profound shift for people, systems, and species when such warm ocean temperatures become common and not extreme in the GOA and Bering regions.

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.

When the European Space Agency (ESA) launched a satellite into orbit on Oct. 13, it did so despite opposition from Inuit leaders in Canada and Greenland over its potential to contaminate an important Arctic area.