Tag: Arctic

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OneWeb targets Arctic for satellite network kickoff

OneWeb satellite
An artist’s conception shows one of OneWeb’s satellites in orbit. (OneWeb Satellites Illustration)

OneWeb says it’ll start delivering broadband internet service to the Arctic via satellite in 2020, turning the “Last Frontier” into a new frontier for data beamed from orbit.

The London-based company provided fresh details about its market rollout today, saying that it will deliver fiber-like connectivity amounting to 375 gigabits per second of data transmission capacity above the 60th parallel north by the end of next year.

That area takes in most of Alaska as well as Canada’s Yukon Territory, Northwest Territories and Nunavut, plus parts of Quebec, Newfoundland and Labrador. It also encompasses Greenland, Iceland and parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia. (The Arctic Circle is a little higher up, at about 66.5 degrees north.)

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Whew! Chukchi Sea polar bears are in good shape

Polar Bears
An adult female polar bear and a cub stroll on Wrangel Island in the fall of 2017. Hundreds of Chukchi Sea polar bears spend the summer months on the island. (University of Washington Photo / Eric Regehr)

The first census of polar bears living around the Chukchi Sea, straddling Alaska and eastern Siberia, suggests that the population has been stable and healthy over the past decade.

That comes as a welcome contrast to the problems facing polar bears in other Arctic regions as their sea-ice habitat shrinks. The loss of  sea ice is an issue for the Chukchi Sea as well, but the nearly 3,000 bears in that region don’t seem to be feeling the strain as much.

“Despite having about one month less time on preferred sea-ice habitats to hunt compared with 25 years ago, we found that the Chukchi Sea subpopulation was doing well from 2008 to 2016,” Eric Regehr, a biologist at the University of Washington’s Polar Science Center, said today in a news release.

Regehr is the principal author of a study about the census published in the open-access journal Scientific Reports. The census, conducted by researchers from UW and federal agencies, chronicles a decade’s worth of observations — and delves into why the Chukchi Sea bears seem to be faring better than their cousins elsewhere.

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Scientists dig the jazz that bowhead whales sing

Bowhead whale
A bowhead whale surfaces in Fram Strait. (Norwegian Polar Institute Photo / Kit Kovacs)

A research team led by an University of Washington oceanographer has published the largest known set of songs from bowhead whales, the jazz singers of the cetacean tribe.

An analysis of 184 different songs, recorded between 2010 and 2014, finds that bowhead whales swimming in the Arctic Ocean east of Greenland have a surprisingly diverse repertoire of vocalizations.

“If humpback whale song is like classical music, bowheads are jazz,” study lead author Kate Stafford of UW’s Applied Physics Laboratory said in a news release. “The sound is more free form. And when we looked through four winters of acoustic data, not only were there never any song types repeated between years, but each season had a new set of songs.”

Stafford and her colleagues published their findings in today’s issue of Biology Letters.

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Arctic Report Card heats up climate concern

Arctic warming
From October 2015 to September 2016, the Arctic region recorded its warmest temperatures on record. Shades of red indicate how much warmer the temperature was compared to the 1981-2010 average. (NOAA / NCEP Graphic)

The latest update on Arctic climate shows that temperatures at the top of the world are increasing at twice the global rate, setting an assortment of records and near-records.

“Rarely have we seen the Arctic show a clearer, stronger or more pronounced signal of persistent warming and its cascading effects on the environment than this year,” Jeremy Mathis, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Arctic Research Program, said in a news release.

The Arctic Report Card, issued annually by NOAA, was released today in conjunction with the American Geophysical Union’s fall meeting in San Francisco. The annual report brings together peer-reviewed findings produced by 61 scientists from 11 nations.

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Arctic sea-ice study is bad news for polar bears

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A polar bear tests the strength of thin Arctic sea ice. (Credit: Mario Hoppmann via Imaggeo.EGU.eu)

Scientists have long known that Arctic climate change is bad news for bears, but University of Washington researchers quantify just how bad it is in a study published today.

The study in The Cryosphere, a journal of the European Geosciences Union, is said to be the first to assess the impact of sea ice changes for 19 different populations of polar bears across the entire Arctic region, using the metrics that are most relevant to polar bear biology.

“This study shows declining sea ice for all subpopulations of polar bears,” Harry Stern, a researcher with UW’s Polar Science Center, said in an EGU news release.

The analysis draws upon 35 years’ worth of satellite data showing daily sea-ice concentration in the Arctic. There’s a consistent trend toward earlier thawing in the spring, and later freezing in the winter. Between 1979 and 2014, the total number of ice-covered days declined at the rate of 7 to 19 days per decade. Over the course of 35 years, seven weeks of good sea-ice habitat were lost.

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Senators want to close the icebreaker gap

Image: Murkowski and Cantwell
U.S. Sens. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, and Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., call on the White House to upgrade the Coast Guard’s icebreaker fleet. In the background are workers at Vigor Shipyards, where the icebreaker USCGS Healy is undergoing maintenance. (GeekWire photo by Alan Boyle)

Two U.S. senators from opposite sides of the aisle – Washington Democrat Maria Cantwell and Alaska Republican Lisa Murkowski – teamed up on Friday to hold President Barack Obama to his word when it comes to beefing up the U.S. Coast Guard’s sagging fleet of polar icebreakers.

“We are falling behind in our icebreaking capacity,” Cantwell said during a news conference at Seattle’s Vigor Shipyards, where the medium icebreaker Healy is undergoing maintenance. She underscored her concern in a letter that was sent to Obama and released to journalists.

“There is a race to the Arctic – and the United States isn’t even in the game,” Cantwell said in the letter.

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