NEWS

Polar bears are getting thinner and having fewer cubs. Melting sea ice is to blame

February 14, 2020 – The impact of the climate crisis is becoming more and more obvious to humans and their animal neighbors. But among all species, polar bears might be some of the hardest hit.

Polar bears in Baffin Bay skinnier, having fewer cubs due to less sea ice

February 12, 2020 – Polar bears are spending more time on land than they did in the 1990s due to reduced sea ice, new University of Washington-led research shows. Bears in Baffin Bay are getting thinner and adult females are having fewer cubs than when sea ice was more available.

Polar Bears Struggle as Sea Ice Declines

February 4, 2020 – A polar bear’s life seems simple enough: eat seals, mate, and raise cubs. But a recent study shows some subpopulations of polar bears are struggling to complete these essential tasks because of declining concentrations of Arctic sea ice.

Last Arctic ice refuge is disappearing

November 12, 2019 – Former UW Arctic Fulbright Chair, Kent Moore with PSC researchers Axel Schweiger, Jinlun Zhang and Mike Steele on how the  oldest and thickest Arctic sea ice is disappearing twice as fast as ice in the rest of the Arctic Ocean.

Nexus Media: Century-Old Ship Logs Show How Much Ice the Arctic Has Lost Old, handwritten logbooks prove computer models are right — the Arctic has lost a frightening amount of sea ice

Popular Mechanics: How Century-Old Ice Data Is Helping Track a Melting Arctic

Century-old ship logs reveal extent of today’s drastic Arctic melt

Two UW ice researchers to participate in year-long drift across Arctic Ocean

September 20, 2019 – PSC’s Bonnie Light and Madison Smith will participate in the MOSAiC expedition in 2020. Read the UW News story to learn about the expedition and how it will contribute to Arctic research. 

Century-Old Ship Logs Show How Much Ice the Arctic Has Lost

September 17, 2019 – Research by Axel Schweiger and Jinlun Zhang in Collaboration with Kevin Wood from JISAO reconstructs sea ice volume and thickness since 1901. 

Shipping logs show how quickly Arctic sea ice is melting

August 13, 2019 – The Economist covers research by Axel Schweiger and Jinlun Zhang in collaboration with Kevin Wood at JISAO. Reconstruction of sea ice thickness and volume since 1901 uses logs from old US revenue cutters traveling in the Arctic in the early 20th century.

Hacking ICESat-2: How an Open Science Workshop Helped Scientists Wrangle Big Data

August 2019 – NASA’s Center for Climate Simulation reported on the recent Cryospheric Science Hackweek held at UW. The article includes an interview with PSC’s Anthony Arendt and workshop coverage from other planners, facilitators, and participants. 

Congratulations, Sarah Dewey!

Congratulations to PSC’s Sarah Dewey for passing her PhD Defense! She presented her research earlier this month with her talk, Evolving Ice-Ocean Dynamics of the Western Arctic. 

ICESat-2 Hackweek 2019

June 18, 2019 – This week is ICESat-2 Hackweek 2019, held at the University of Washington. Participants are learning about technologies used to access and process ICESat-2 data with a focus on the cryosphere.

Researchers test ice probe on Mount Baker

June 15, 2019 – PSC’s Dale Winebrenner and his team conducted fieldwork on Mount Baker’s Easton Glacier with the help of a local snowmobile club. The team is involved in developing equipment to better study lakes beneath not only the Antarctic ice but hopefully under the ice on other planets. 

Low‐Level and Surface Wind Jets Near Sea Ice Edge in the Beaufort Sea in Late Autumn

June 6, 2019 – The latest paper authored by Zheng Liu and Axel Schweiger has been published in JGR Atmospheres. Read how dropsonde observations made from Seasonal Ice Zone Reconnaissance Survey flights were used to examine low‐level and surface “ice edge jets” in the Beaufort Sea.

The Arctic Ocean has lost 95 percent of its oldest ice — a startling sign of what’s to come

The Arctic Ocean has lost 95 percent of its oldest ice — a startling sign of what’s to comeIf the thinning trend continues, scientists fear an added boost to global warming.Chris Mooney of the Washington Post talked with Axel Schweiger and other scientists about sea ice loss in the Arctic

AGU Fall Meeting 2018

PSC members join their colleagues and peers at the AGU Fall Meeting 2018 in Washington DC. 

Study finds healthy group of polar bears in sea near Alaska

The AP News talks to PSC’s Eric Regehr, the lead author of a polar bear study published in Scientific Reports. Regehr was involved in the first formal count of polar bears in waters between the United States and Russia. Despite being listed as a threatened species because of diminished sea ice due to climate change, Regehr and his colleagues estimate a healthy and abundant population in the Chukchi Sea off Alaska’s northwest coast.

First tally of U.S.-Russia polar bears finds a healthy population

UW News covers PSC’s Eric Regehr’s polar bear study of the Chukchi Sea subpopulation. This is the first formal study of this population and is published in the open-access journal Scientific Reports. Read on to learn more about the lead author’s decade-long project and the status of the Chukchi Sea polar bears.

APL-UW 75th Anniversary Seminar Series: Polar Science Center

Kristin Laidre presented the fourth seminar in the APL-UW 75th Anniversary series, “The Polar Science Center From Ice Dynamics to Polar Bears.” 

Polar bears gorged on whale carcasses to survive past warm periods (video)

UW News produced a video reporting on Kristin Laidre‘s recent study of carcasses of stranded whales as a food source for polar bears during past warm periods in the Arctic. The short clip accompanies the university news source’s article and interview of Kristin and co-authors. 

Polar bears gorged on whale carcasses to survive past warm periods, but strategy won’t suffice as climate warms

UW News covers Kristin Laidre‘s recent study of carcasses of stranded whales as a food source for polar bears during past warm periods in the Arctic. The university news source talks with Kristin and her co-authors and provides access to the research paper. 

ICESat-2 Launches, Promising New Era of Glaciology and Polar Oceanography

The Applied Physics Laboratory-UW interviews PSC’s Jamie Morison and Ben Smith about ICESat-2, their roles in the NASA project and how it will improve research efforts and data. Watch the video here or on APL’s YouTube channel.

Beluga whales adopt lost narwhal in St. Lawrence River

PSC’s Kristin Laidre lends her expertise to a CBC News story of a juvenile narwhal adopted by a pod of Beluga whales in the St. Lawrence River.

Greenland’s Polar Bear Hunters Face a Climate of Change

Hakai Magazine covered a recent paper led by PSC’s Kristin Laidre and asked about the collaborative project in which Kristin, the research team, and interpreters interviewed Inuit hunters and gathered traditional knowledge on polar bear ecology in East Greenland. Read the article to find out how the subsistence and cultural relationships have changed for the arctic animals & Indigenous communities. 

UW scientists monitoring arctic ice by NASA satellite

PSC’s Jamie Morison and Ben Smith are interviewed by KING 5 news about NASA’s latest space laser, Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2), which launches 15 September. ICESat-2 helps monitor glaciers, sea ice and ice sheets via NASA satellite technology. Watch the interview to learn more.

Dataset Highlight: Investigating Rotten Ice, with Dr. Karen Junge

The Arctic Data Center, supported by NSF, has highlighted Karen Junge’s work investigating rotten ice. Data has been collected on both the physical and biological properties of rotten ice and is available from the center.  

Narwhals Are Real, And They Could Be in Real Trouble

Atlas Obscura covers a recent study led by former PSC postdoc Donna Hauser, along with Kristin Laidre and Harry Stern. The travel source shares how increased ship traffic in the Arctic increases the vulnerability of many marine mammals, especially the narwhal.

Vulnerability of Arctic marine mammals to vessel traffic in the increasingly ice-free Northwest Passage and Northern Sea Route

The Arctic passageways have experienced increased commercial traffic due to less sea ice for longer durations. In a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, recent PSC postdoc Donna Hauser and co-authors, Kristin Laidre and Harry Stern, show the vulnerability of 80 subpopulations of seven endemic Arctic marine mammal species to vessel traffic across the Northwest Passage and Northern Sea Route during the open-water season. 

East Greenland’s Inuit Hunters Are Teaching Scientists About Polar Bears

What is traditional knowledge and how can it help us understand climate change? Online news source, Earther, talks to Kristin Laidre about her recently published research involving some of the Inuit communities of East Greenland. Inuit sustenance hunters were interviewed about their livelihood, the landscape of their homeland, and more to form a picture of how things have changed over time. 

A promising target in the quest for a 1-million-year-old Antarctic ice core

UW News talks to PSC’s Laura Kehrl about a recently published study identifying a locale in #Antarctica that may provide a continuous ice core record of the last 1 million yrs. The research team, which included members from UW and UMaine, used ice‐penetrating radar and an ice flow model to map the promising region. Kehrl is the corresponding author for the study published in AGU’s Geophysical Research Letters. Read on to learn how the team conducted their fieldwork…

Polar Bears… On The Edge of Extinction?

PSC’s Ignatius Rigor brings his sea ice expertise to the podcast series Science Vs as they investigate the idea of the polar bear moving toward extinction. 

Traditional Knowledge About Polar Bears (Ursus maritimus) in East Greenland: Changes in the Catch and Climate Over Two Decades

How has the loss of sea-ice and other effects of climate change impact Inuit communities that rely on polar bears for nutritional, economic, and cultural subsistence? Frontiers in Marine Science, the open-access journal, has published a report where Kristin Laidre and her colleagues examined Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) survey results collected from subsistence polar bear hunters living in East Greenland.

Here’s what vanishing sea ice in the Arctic means for you

The Verge, a news website for the mainstream, interviewed PSC’s Ignatius Rigor and other researchers to find out how vanishing sea ice in the Arctic impacts the general public.

UW researcher, Fulbright Scholar, spent winter above the Arctic Circle

UW Today talks to Cecilia Peralta Ferriz about her experiences in Norway, as a U.S. Fulbright Scholar, before she returns to Seattle at the end of May.

Ionospheric correction of InSAR data for accurate ice velocity measurement at polar regions

Interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) is a widely used tool for measuring ice sheet velocity in the Polar Regions. However, the ionosphere is a prevalent source of noise in these data. Ian Joughin is a co-author of a study, published in the May 2018 issue of Remote Sensing Environment, where a split-spectrum technique was utilized, and its performance analyzed, for correcting ionospheric effects in InSAR-based ice velocity measurements in Greenland and Antarctica. Read on to learn if the technique effectively reduced noise level…

EDITOR’S HIGHLIGHTS – A possible link between winter Arctic sea ice decline and a collapse of the Beaufort High?

Axel Schweiger, Jinlun Zhang, and Mike Steele are co-authors on an article that earned the Editor’s Highlight for AGU’s recent Geophysical Research Letters. Read on to learn why the article, Collapse of the 2017 Winter Beaufort High: A Response to Thinning Sea Ice?, drew such attention…

Chasing Narwhals, Unicorns of the Sea

Third Pod from the Sun, the American Geophysical Union’s podcast, kicks off the month of March with PSC’s Kristin Laidre.

2018 Ocean Sciences Meeting

The 2018 Ocean Sciences Meeting (OSM), co-sponsored by the American Geophysical Union (AGU), the Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography (ASLO), and The Oceanography Society (TOS), will be held 11–16 February, in Portland, Oregon. Some of the members of PSC will join their colleagues from the University of Washington and other institutions to present and discuss their latest marine science research endeavors.

The Polar Science Center lost one of its founders: Alan Thorndike

Alan Thorndike died on Jan 8, 2018 from an aggressive pneumonia. He was 72 years old. For those of you who don’t know, Alan was one of the original AIDJEX gang and founding PIs of PSC. Working with Drew Rothrock, he developed the concept of the thickness distribution that is at the heart of most sea ice models.

Scientists seek US backcountry skiers to measure snowpack

The Washington Post spreads the word about PSC’s Anthony Arendt’s current collaborative project, Community Snow Observations (CSO), a citizen snow-measuring program. Read more to learn how the public can participate and why measuring snow is part of the science.

Identifying shifts in maternity den phenology and habitat characteristics of polar bears (Ursus maritimus) in Baffin Bay and Kane Basin

Erica Escajeda and Kristin Laidre were part of an international team of researchers that studied polar bear maternity dens and compared current data with previously published data through the 1990s. Read the findings published in Polar Biology.

AGU Fall Meeting 2017

PSC members join their colleagues and peers at the AGU 2017 Fall Meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Stressed-Out Narwhals Don’t Know Whether To Freeze Or Flee, Scientists Find

NPR interviews PSC’s Kristin Laidre on the recent discovery of the narhwals’ unique reaction to stress and why its effects should be quantified.

Narwhals Wearing Heart Monitors Reveal Danger of Human Encounters

National Geographic asks PSC’s Kristin Laidre about a new unaffiliated study of the escape response of East Greenland narwhals.

Human Disturbance hits Narwhals Where it Hurts — the Heart

The Washington Post covered new research findings on narwhal physiology and asked PSC’s Kristin Laidre what it will mean for the species in a changing Arctic. 

Narwhal recruits track melting Arctic ice

NASA’s Sea Level News provides more details on the agency teaming up with PSC’s Kristin Laidre to further the Oceans Melting Greenland (OMG) project in progress. Data gathered by tagged narwhals will expand our understanding of both narwhal behavior and melting glaciers. Click below to learn more about the research endeavor and how the partnership came about…

Editor’s Highlight— A Meteoric Water Budget for the Arctic Ocean

Matt Alkire leads the PSC team of authors that earned the Editor’s Highlight for AGU’s recent JGR: Oceans issue. Read on to learn why Matt’s article, A meteoric water budget for the Arctic Ocean, was singled out…

Navy Leads International Effort to Deploy Buoys Into the Arctic Ocean

PSC’s Ignatius Rigor took part in buoy deployments near the North Pole, in early September, as part of the International Arctic Buoy Program (IABP) – a partnership of global participants maintaining a network of drifting buoys in the Arctic Ocean. Read the Navy News Service post to learn more about IABP and the joint mission…

Narwhals helping NASA understand melting ice

Narwhals are intentionally a part of NASA’S project, Oceans Melting Greenland (OMG). PSC’s Kristin Laidre explains why the whales play a vital role in studying the ice in a recent story from The Washington Post/Bloomberg News and presented by their various news outlets. 

Future of Ice Postdoctoral Research Opportunities in Polar Regions Research

The Quaternary Research Center (QRC) and the Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) at the University of Washington, Seattle, USA, are seeking Postdoctoral Research Associates with interests in the polar regions.

Arctic Sea Ice Extent and Volume Follow Long-term Trend

In mid-September Arctic sea ice reaches its minimum extent and volume. There are annual fluctuations — 2012 was a record low for both measures — but reports of a recent ‘rebound’ are short-sighted. Axel Schweiger explains why the downward long-term trend is clear.