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The Arctic Ocean could be a significant contributor of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, scientists reported on Sunday. Researchers carried out five flights in 2009 and 2010 to measure atmospheric methane in latitudes as high as 82 degrees north. They found concentrations of the gas close to the ocean surface, especially in areas where sea ice had cracked or broken up. The study, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, wonders if this is a disturbing new mechanism that could accelerate global warming. "We suggest that the surface waters of the Arctic Ocean represent a potentially important source of methane, which...

STOCKHOLM – An island of ice more than four times the size of Manhattan is drifting across the Arctic Ocean after breaking off from a glacier in Greenland. Potentially in the path of this unstoppable giant are oil platforms and shipping lanes — and any collision could do untold damage. In a worst case scenario, large chunks could reach the heavily trafficked waters where another Greenland iceberg sank the Titanic in 1912. It's been a summer of near biblical climatic havoc across the planet, with wildfires, heat and smog in Russia and killer floods in Asia. But the moment the...

PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) -- Shell Oil is ready to drill in the Arctic Ocean this summer and asked a federal appeals court Thursday to rule quickly on a challenge by environmentalists concerned about the risk of a major spill after the Gulf of Mexico disaster. Kathleen Sullivan, an attorney for Shell, said the company has spent at least $3.5 billion on Alaska operations in the past few years as it prepares for exploratory drilling set for July in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas. "Shell has waited years to recover its investment," Sullivan told a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S....

Global Warming: The Alaskan governor who knew polar bears weren't endangered says the planet isn't either and challenges the oracle of climate change. Al Gore says despite the CRU e-mails, the situation is of the utmost gravity. In a Dec. 9 Washington Post op-ed, Sarah Palin noted that the Climate-gate e-mails from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia "reveal that leading climate 'experts' deliberately destroyed records, manipulated data to 'hide the decline' in global temperatures and tried to silence their critics from publishing in peer-reviewed journals." This did not sit well with Gore. "The entire North...

It’s the Sun, Stupid! By Dr. Willie Soon The theory that climate change is chiefly caused by solar influences “is no longer tenable,” says US National Academy of Sciences president Ralph Cicerone. Carbon dioxide, he argues, is the key driver of recent climate change. I beg to differ. The amount and distribution of solar energy that we receive varies as the Earth revolves around the Sun and also in response to changes in the Sun’s activity. Scientists have now been studying solar influences on climate for 5000 years. Chinese imperial astronomers kept detailed sunspot records. They noticed that more sunspots...

Enlarge ImageFrigid find. The location (red star) of the ancient turtle fossil (inset) is seen on a map centered on the North Pole. Researchers speculate that Asian turtles (red diamonds) migrated to North America (green squares) across an archipelago created by the Alpha Ridge. Credit: Tom Whitley Sometime about 90 million years ago, Asian turtles hit the road for North America. Although researchers thought that these reptiles had crawled around the globe via Russia and Alaska, new findings suggest that they may have taken a shortcut--over a series of islands now submerged under the Arctic Sea. The conclusions are...

Arctic sea ice is alleged to be diminishing due to global warming. Want to see a half million square kilometers of Arctic ice disappear overnight? Compare the Nansen sea ice extent charts, from the Norweigian Nansen Environmental & Remote Sensing Center, shown on these two websites: This one has a "blink comparator" which alternates between both the original and the revision. It shows an initial extent of about 12.3 million square kilometers changing to 11.8 square kilometers overnight (data values as of December 11, 2008). Here is today's Nansen website, which has grown to 11.9 million square kilometers as of December 13, 2008. The...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A U.S. Coast Guard cutter is headed to the Arctic this week on a mapping mission to determine whether part of this area can be considered U.S. territory, after recent polar forays by Russia and Canada. The four-week cruise of the Coast Guard Cutter Healy starts Friday and aims to map the sea floor on the northern Chukchi Cap, an underwater plateau that extends from Alaska's North Slope some 500 miles northward. This is the third such U.S. Arctic mapping cruise -- others were in 2003 and 2004 -- and is not a response to a Russian...

OTTAWA (AFP) - Canada dismissed Russia's flag-planting at the North Pole on Thursday as a "15th century" stunt that does not bolster its disputed claim to the resource-rich Arctic. "Look, this isn't the 15th century. You can't go around the world and plant flags and say, 'We're claiming this territory,'" Foreign Minister Peter MacKay told broadcaster CTV. Earlier, a Russian mini-submarine reached the bottom of the Arctic Ocean under the North Pole at a depth of 4,261 meters (13,980 feet), to carry out scientific tests and leave a Russian flag. The dive is believed to be the first of its...

Russia criticised for planting Arctic flag Last Updated: 1:42am BST 03/08/2007 Russia has been condemned for planting its flag on the seabed at the North Pole in a symbolic bid to stake a claim to the vast mineral wealth of the Arctic. Explorers from the country descended 14,000ft in a mini-submarine to place the titanium flag in an area that is home to a quarter of the world's untapped energy reserves. Russia also used the expedition, disclosed in The Daily Telegraph , to gather samples to substantiate its claim that the Lomonosov Ridge, a shelf that runs through the Arctic,...

via translation - Both Russian corruption reached the bottom of the Arctic Ocean at the North Pole Moscow. August 2. Interfax-Russia says "Mir-1 and Mir 2, safely reached the bottom of the Arctic Ocean near the North Pole. As the program "Vesti-24", says the Russian "Mir-1" slipped to a depth of 4261 meters and reached the bottom of the Arctic Ocean, and the second says "Mir-2" continues to fall to the ocean bottom. Sinking a record depth began with a half behind schedule and should take several hours. To launch vehicles was chosen polynya size 10 by 25 metres. As...

Excerpt - MOSCOW: An expedition aimed at strengthening Russia's claim to much of the Arctic Ocean region reached the North Pole on Wednesday afternoon and immediately began preparations for unloading two mini-submarines that will mark the sea floor with a capsule carrying Russian flag. The Rossiya atomic icebreaker had plowed a path to the pole through a sheet of multiyear ice, clearing the way for the Akademik Fedorov research ship to follow, said Sergei Balyasnikov a spokesman for the Arctic and Antarctic research institute that prepared the expedition. The voyage, led by polar explorer and Russian legislator Artur Chilingarov, has...

Does CO2 really drive global warming? I don’t believe that it does.To the contrary, if you apply the IFF test—if-and-only-if or necessary-and-sufficient—the outcome would appear to be exactly the reverse. Rather than the rising levels of carbon dioxide driving up the temperature, the logical conclusion is that it is the rising temperature that is driving up the CO2 level. Of course, this raises a raft of questions, but they are all answerable. What is particularly critical is distinguishing between the observed phenomenon, or the “what”, from the governing mechanism, or the “why”. Confusion between these two would appear to be...

The studies on Arctic sediment that appear today in the journal Nature tell a dramatic story of polar warming and cooling over millions of years. But what they tell petroleum geologists may be just as striking. Though there is little mention of it in the papers, some scientists involved in the work said the huge amounts of organic material from dead algae and plants embedded in the ancient sedimentary layers suggested that the center of the Arctic Ocean could hold vast oil deposits.

he ice-cloaked Arctic Ocean was once apparently a warm, biologically brewing basin so rich in sinking organic material that some scientists examining fresh evidence pulled from a submerged ridge near the North Pole say the seabed may now hold significant oil and gas deposits. This is just one of many findings from a pioneering expedition that in late summer sent dozens of scientists and technicians on three icebreakers - one with a drilling rig nine stories tall - into the drifting, crunching plates of sea ice to retrieve the first long-term record of climate and ocean conditions there. The expedition...

Findings reported from the first ever detailed exploration of the Gakkel Ridge—the northernmost segment of the worldwide mid-ocean ridge system that snakes for 1,100 miles (1,800 kilometers) beneath the Arctic Ocean—underscore the waiting discoveries on the frontiers of Earth science. For decades scientists longingly eyed the Gakkel Ridge. But since it lies beneath a cover of sea ice, access to it has been limited. Apart from a single submarine study, much of what was known about the undersea region's geology was extrapolated from studies of other, more accessible, ocean ridges. [snip]But based on rock samples dredged from the ocean floor...