Climate change is thawing permafrost and increasing the risk of these accidents, and the region has fewer of the bacteria that can ‘clean up’ oil spills.
This Arctic heat wave has been unusually long-lived. The darkest reds on this map of the Arctic are areas that were more than 14 degrees Fahrenheit warmer in the spring of 2020 compared to the recent 15-year average.
Joshua Stevens/NASA Earth Observatory
The Arctic is warming about twice as fast as the planet as a whole, with serious consequences. Scientists have been warning about this for decades.
Temperature anomalies from March 19 to June 20 2020. Red colors depict areas that were hotter than average for the same period from 2003-2018; blues were colder than average.
EPA-EFE/NASA
The wet and low-lying East Siberian Arctic is likely to be a major methane source in the coming decades.
Neanderthal hunting grounds in southern Siberia — the Charysh River valley, with Chagyrskaya Cave in the centre of the photo.
Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences
Neanderthals living in a cave in southern Siberia made distinctive stone tools that can be traced to their ancestral homeland in eastern Europe — an intercontinental journey of more than 3,000 km.
Some lakes in the Arctic are expanding and others are disappearing as permafrost thaws.
This lake north of Inuvik, N.W.T., is expanding as the ice wedges (darker lines leading away from the lake) around this lake melt and the ground subsides.
(Philip Marsh)
Hundreds of thousands of lakes, rivers and streams in the Arctic exist only because of the permafrost that lies beneath them. The warming Arctic threatens to change that.
Smoke from wildfires in Siberia drifts east toward Canada and the U.S. on July 30, 2019.
NASA
A researcher based in Fairbanks, Alaska, links 2019’s record-breaking wildfires in far northern regions of the world to climate change, and describes what it’s like as zones near her city burn.
A stand of Miscanthus x giganteus at the University of Illinois’s Energy Farm.
Brian Stauffer/University of Illinois
Charles Pignon, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
In the eastern reaches of Siberia, scientists discovered plants with exceptional cold tolerance that could be the key to sustainable bioenergy production.
Richard ‘Bert’ Roberts, Vladimir Uliyanov and Maxim Kozlikin (clockwise from top) examining sediments in the East Chamber of Denisova Cave.
Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Author provided
New studies reveal when the Denisovans and their Neanderthal cousins occupied a cave in southern Siberia. It’s the only site known to have been inhabited by them and by modern humans.