A new University of Washington-led study found that polar bears that recently denned had higher average blood sugar levels over the previous months than those that had not. When combined with the absence of cubs, the lack of denning may point to reproductive failure and help researchers better asses bear populations and guide conservation efforts
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PSC is pleased to welcome Dr. Jessica Badgeley to our ranks! Jessica’s research focuses on how ice sheets and glaciers respond to climate shifts – from glacial-interglacial transitions to seasonal cycles to modern climate change – and how this response translates to societally relevant questions related to sea level rise and freshwater resources.
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| Polar Science Day includes hands-on activities, live demonstrations, and exhibits presented by scientists who work in some of the most remote and challenging places on earth. Learn about ice sheets and sea ice, polar bears and penguins, scientific instruments, and polar expeditions. Don’t miss Polar Science Day! |
| Polar Science Weekend is two days of hands-on activities, live demonstrations, and exhibits presented by scientists who work in some of the most remote and challenging places on earth. Learn about ice sheets and sea ice, polar bears and penguins, scientific instruments, and polar expeditions. Don’t miss Polar Science Weekend! |
The Scientists Watching Their Life’s Work Disappear
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In July 2023, the Office of Naval Research (ONR) partnered with the 144th Airlift Squadron of the Alaska Air National Guard to deploy five different types of weather buoys across more than 1,000 nautical miles of the Arctic Ocean. Such deployments are critical for maintaining the Arctic Observing Network (AON), which provides observations for weather and ice forecasting and related research.
The 144th Airlift Squadron (the “Arctic Wolves”) and part of the 176th Wing (the “Arctic Guardians”) conducted the flights on a C-17 Globemaster III aircraft. In addition to personnel from the 176th Wing, participants included PSC’s Ignatius Rigor along with professors and scientists from the University of Maryland as well as ONR reservists.
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Researchers used data from a pan-Arctic survey of carbon and trace elements to better understand how climate change will affect primary production in one of the fastest warming regions of the world.
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Welcome, Dr. Laramie Jensen! Laramie Jensen is a high latitude chemical oceanographer who received her PhD in Oceanography from Texas A&M University in 2020. She studies micronutrient trace metals (like iron, manganese, copper, nickel, zinc, cadmium, lead, and more) and how their supply to the Arctic is changing. As a former CICOES postdoc here at UW, she collaborated with Drs Rebecca Woodgate and Cecilia Peralta Ferriz at the PSC to combine trace metal and macronutrient measurements with the high resolution hydrography surveys conducted as part of the Bering Strait Mooring Project. She is looking forward to continuing this project and expanding…
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The Pacific Science Center will be showing Arctic: Our Frozen Planet, an IMAX nature documentary by the BBC which PSC’s very own Eric Regehr helped film, and also appears in! Dr. Regehr will be doing a Q&A about polar bears after the showing on May 27. Regehr will answer questions from the audience after the morning and afternoon showings on Saturday, May 27. The Thursday, May 25, evening showing will feature a Q&A with UW glaciologist Ian Joughin. Admission is $5, or free for PacSci members.Narrated by Benedict Cumberbatch, Arctic: Our Frozen Planet is an epic adventure across the magical realm of snow and ice at the top…
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Polar Science Center Chair Dr. Bonnie Light joined a group of international scientists in Bremerhaven, Germany in January 2023 to process and analyze sea ice core samples brought back from the 2019-2020 MOSAiC expedition. Photo Credit: Amy Lauren
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Images of massive chunks of ice collapsing from Greenland’s glaciers into the ocean have become emblematic of a changing climate and the need to drastically reduce global carbon emissions.University of Maryland Assistant Professor of Art Cy Keener is working to characterize some of these icebergs—capturing their unique identities and the ways they change as they drift in the sea.His collaborative “Iceberg Portraiture” series is part of an exhibition now on view at the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in Washington, D.C., which Keener created with landscape researcher Justine Holzman, climatologist Ignatius Rigor and scientist John Woods. It’s the result of almost…
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Welcome, Dr. Astrid Pacini! Astrid received her PhD in Physical Oceanography from the MIT-WHOI Joint Program in 2022 and holds a BS in Mechanical Engineering from Yale.
She joins PSC as a postdoctoral research associate and holds a 2022 NSF Office of Polar Programs Fellowship. Astrid will work with Dr. Michael Steele, examining the evolution of upper ocean properties in the Arctic Ocean’s Seasonal Ice Zone. Astrid loves field work and has spent time on various research vessels, but her favorite ship will always be the RV Neil Armstrong, where she spent six months during graduate school. At the PSC, she is excited to continue mentoring high school and undergraduate students, and participating in outreach programs.
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Audio clip from Scientific American’s 60-Second Science with Polar Science Center’s Kristin Laidre explaining why she and PSC alumna Twila Moon were so fascinated by their recent Science Magazine results.
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A new population of polar bears documented on the southeast coast of Greenland use glacier ice to survive despite limited access to sea ice. This small, genetically distinct group of polar bears could be important to the future of the species in a warming world
A new study finds that an area of the Arctic Ocean critical for the survival of polar bears is fast becoming vulnerable to climate change.
The region, dubbed the “last ice area” had been expected to stay frozen far longer than other parts of the Arctic.
But this new analysis says that this area suffered record melting last summer.
The researchers say that high winds allied to a changing climate were behind the unexpected decline.
The region, which could provide a last refuge for polar bears and other Arctic wildlife that depends on ice, is not as stable as previously thought, according to a new study.
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June 11, 2021 – “We may not have the luxury of waiting for slow changes on Pine Island; things could actually go much quicker than expected,” said lead author Ian Joughin, a glaciologist at the UW Applied Physics Laboratory. “The processes we’d been studying in this region were leading to an irreversible collapse, but at a fairly measured pace. Things could be much more abrupt if we lose the rest of that ice shelf.”
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The APL family lost a dear friend and a key figure in our success in polar oceanography when Andy Heiberg passed away at home with his family on February 17, 2021 after short struggle with pancreatic cancer.
Andy was an internationally known expert in operations and logistics for scientific fieldwork on sea ice. His career at the APL Polar Science Center began before PSC was part of APL and even before PSC was created…..
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November 02, 2020 – @Michalea_King: This week, I officially (but remotely) begin my postdoctoral fellowship at APL @PolarScience_UW at the University of Washington. Looking forward to working with a lot of fantastic people and making the big cross-country move to Seattle in January!
September 23, 2020 – New research shows that Kane Basin polar bears are doing better, on average, in recent years than they were in the 1990s. The study, published Sept. 23 in Global Change Biology, finds the bears are healthier as conditions are warming because thinning and shrinking multiyear sea ice is allowing more sunlight to reach the ocean surface, which makes the system more ecologically productive.
May 8, 2020 – Maddie Smith is ready to drift through life for a little while. But it’s not because she’s lost focus. In fact, the postdoctoral researcher at the University of Washington’s Applied Physics Laboratory is embarking on the trip of a lifetime for any scientist interested in better understanding global warming.
April 30, 2020 – Using the most advanced Earth-observing laser instrument NASA has ever flown in space, a team of scientists led by the University of Washington has made precise measurements of how the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets have changed over 16 years.
“If you watch a glacier or ice sheet for a month, or a year, you’re not going to learn much about what the climate is doing to it,” said lead author Benjamin Smith, a glaciologist at the UW Applied Physics Laboratory. “We now have a 16-year span between ICESat and ICESat-2 and can be much more confident that the changes we’re seeing in the ice have to do with the long-term changes in the climate.
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April 30, 2020 – PSC researcher Ben Smith’s paper ‘Pervasive ice sheet mass loss reflects competing ocean and atmosphere processes’ discussed in the New York Times.
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New data from space is providing the most precise picture yet of Antarctica’s ice, where it is accumulating most quickly and disappearing at the fastest rate, and how the changes could contribute to rising sea levels.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
read more »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.
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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.
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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.
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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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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 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.
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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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