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.
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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.
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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.
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Research by Axel Schweiger and Jinlun Zhang in Collaboration with Kevin Wood from JISAO reconstructs sea ice volume and thickness since 1901.
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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.
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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.
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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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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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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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TODAY Show host, Al Roker, traveled to Utqiagvik, Alaska to report on climate change. Al talks with PSC’s Ignatius Rigor about his research and the technology being used to gather data.
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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
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PSC members join their colleagues and peers at the AGU Fall Meeting 2018 in Washington DC.
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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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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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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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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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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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Scavenging on stranded large whale carcasses may have aided polar bear survival through past interglacial periods, during which sea‐ice was limited and access to seals was reduced. Will whales play a similar role in the future as Arctic conditions change? To learn more, read the recent study led by PSC’s Kristin Laidre in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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PSC’s Ian Joughin and Stefanie Mack, along with Ben Hills, attended the workshop, Rising Coastal Seas on a Warming Earth, at New York University Abu Dhabi Institute to devise ways to understanding how ice sheets and oceans interact at the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. UAE’s news source The National reported on the workshop and spoke with a few of the attendees, including Ben.
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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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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…
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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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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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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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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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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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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.
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PSC members join their colleagues and peers at the AGU 2017 Fall Meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana.
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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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National Geographic asks PSC’s Kristin Laidre about a new unaffiliated study of the escape response of East Greenland narwhals.
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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.
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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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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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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…
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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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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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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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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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Polar Science Weekend has a new name, Climate Change Weekend, as part of the Pacific Science Center’s Curiosity Days program. Discover the impact that climate change has on our ecosystems at Curiosity Days: Climate Change. Partake in hands-on activities, watch live science shows and chat with local scientists about the latest research and technology. In partnership with the Science Center, the University of Washington’s Applied Physics Laboratory is bringing cutting-edge research, interactive exhibits and the nation’s top polar scientists to the event.
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PSC research analyzes the future of supraglacial lakes on the Greenland Ice Sheet and how they will, or will not, contribute to global sea level over the coming decades.
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When doing research in the Arctic the elements are big challenge not just for the humans working there but also for the instruments used to collect data. Ignatius Rigor has set up a testing site outside of Barrow, Alaska to monitor an array of instruments and test their reliability and accuracy. Watch the video to learn more about the project.
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This new data set is a concerted effort to collect as many observations of sea ice thickness as possible in one place with consistent formats and with clear and abundant documentation. It will allow the community to better utilize what is now a considerable body of observations from moorings, submarines, aircraft, and satellites.
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The Arctic Sea Ice Volume Anomaly time series is calculated using the Pan-Arctic Ice Ocean Modeling and Assimilation System (PIOMAS) developed at APL/PSC. Updates will be generated at approximately monthly intervals.
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