ICESat-2 Hackweek 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.
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In The News
Researchers test ice probe on Mount Baker
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.
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Low‐Level and Surface Wind Jets Near Sea Ice Edge in the Beaufort Sea in Late Autumn
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.
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AGU Fall Meeting 2018
PSC members join their colleagues and peers at the AGU Fall Meeting 2018 in Washington DC.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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…
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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…
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
read more »AGU Fall Meeting 2017
PSC members join their colleagues and peers at the AGU 2017 Fall Meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana.
read more »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.
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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.
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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.
read more »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…
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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…
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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…
read more »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.
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Cecilia Peralta Ferriz recipient of U.S. Fulbright Scholar grant
Congratulations to Cecilia, who was chosen to participate in the U.S. Fulbright Scholar program. She will spend 9 months in Norway (from mid-August 2017 to mid-May 2018) doing oceanographic research at the Norwegian Polar Institute (NPI) in Tromsø, and at the University Centre in Svalbard (UNIS) in Longyearbyen.
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Remote Sensors Bring Wildlife Tracking to New Level: Trove of data yields fresh insights—and challenges
BioScience talks to PSC’s Kristin Laidre for their coverage of combining remote sensing with animal tracking. Laidre and a field team of researchers tagged polar bears with telemetry devices, such as GPS collars, to collect data. Read the article to learn how Kristin and PSC’s Harry Stern used the remote-sensing data to study polar bear and sea ice trends.
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The Doomsday Glacier
Rolling Stone reports on the changing state of Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica and how it could affect sea levels worldwide. The mainstream article quotes research previously published by PSC’s Ian Joughin, along with Ben Smith and alumnus Brooke Medley.
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Antarctic Peninsula ice more stable than thought
Science Daily reports on a study recently published in Geophysical Research Letters where satellite measurements assessed glacier flow in the Antarctic Peninsula. PSC’s Ian Joughin was part of an international team of researchers, led by the UK Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling at the University of Leeds, and is one of the co-authors.
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Get an Amazing Whale’s-Eye View Underneath Antarctica
Satellite tags and video cameras are successfully tracking movement and recording images of humpback whales along the Antarctic Peninsula. National Geographic asks PSC’s Kristin Laidre about the arduous methods used to collect data on marine mammals in polar environments.
read more »University of Washington programs make top 10 in new global ranking
The Center for World University Rankings (CWUR), publisher of the largest academic ranking of global universities, has released their global rankings of academic disciplines for 2017. Find out which UW programs made the list…
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Conservation Biology Awards
The publication Conservation Biology announced its awards for 2016 and PSC’s Kristin Laidre is the lead author of the paper that earned the second highest altmetric score, Arctic Marine Mammal Population Status, Sea Ice Habitat Loss, and Conservation Recommendations for the 21st Century.
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Laidre led the collaborative effort which involved PSC colleagues Harry Stern and Eric Regehr (at present), along with other researchers from Canada, Greenland, Norway, Russia and other US institutions. Congratulations to Kristin and the team!
Greater role for Atlantic inflows on sea-ice loss in the Eurasian Basin of the Arctic Ocean
Matt Alkire, John Guthrie and Jamie Morison were part of an international team of researchers that studied the effects of the Atlantic Ocean on sea ice cover in the eastern Eurasian Basin of the Arctic Ocean. Read the findings published in Science Magazine.
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Concern over impacts on climate research
News station KING 5 interviews PSC’s Jamie Morison, as environmental policies change under the new administration resulting in strong, public response. Watch the clip of the PSC oceanographer discussing his own research observations, Arctic data available from the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), and the need to continue polar research.
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Engaging Young Learners with Cool Science
APL-UW has produced a video about Polar Science Weekend, an annual public outreach event centering around polar research. Watch APL-UW scientists, including veteran PSW participants PSC’s Ben Smith and Wendy Ermold, explain their research in ways that apply the principles of physics via hands-on activities to the community.
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Polar Bears’ Path to Decline Runs Through Alaskan Village
Polar bears are now a noticeable presence in the Arctic village of Kaktovik, Alaska. The New York Times provides in-depth coverage of their living situation and talks to Eric Regehr, among others, about the loss of habitat and sustenance and the hard adjustments to come for the species.
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How to conserve polar bears — and maintain subsistence harvest — under climate change
The UW Today reports on the open-access study recently published in the Journal of Applied Ecology by PSC’s Eric Regehr and a collaborative team, including Harry Stern. The team combined data collected on polar bear subpopulations with that of sea ice extent and identified ways to carry on subsistence harvesting with the least amount of negative impact already caused by habitat loss.
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Up to half of Arctic melting can be explained by natural changes
The Christian Science Monitor reports on research findings that a large portion of sea ice decline in the Arctic is caused by natural changes. The study was recently published in Nature Climate Change and CSM interviews some of the authors Qinghua Ding, Axel Schweiger and David Battisti.
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Rapid decline of Arctic sea ice a combination of climate change and natural variability
UW Today talks with Qinghua Ding and Axel Schweiger about a new study published in Nature Climate Change of how natural variability affects sea ice loss in the Arctic. Ding, now a PSC affiliate, along with Schweiger and other colleagues from UW and NOAA used decades of data to examine the contribution of the atmospheric circulation to Arctic sea-ice variability.
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Selected Projects
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.
read more »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.
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