It sounds like a punchline for skeptics: Climate change scientists are hoping to move forward by getting stuck.
But the researchers are serious enough they’re parking the Lance research vessel in solid sea ice for six months for one of the most ambitious voyages ever undertaken by the Norwegian Polar Institute.
A restructuring plan relying on a 450-million-kroner loan from the Norwegian government was unveiled this week by Store Norske, which lost a record 537 million kroner in 2014 and only has enough cash to operate until the end of March.
www.icepeople.net/pdfs/icepeople011315.pdf Store Norske unveils its bailout proposal, a research ship prepares to spend six months frozen in the sea ice, Longyearbyen will need to find…
UNIS wants ‘doubling’ plan hastened due to Store Norske
The University Centre in Svalbard is hoping to drastically accelerate plans to double its students and staff in the wake of the Store Norske crisis, telling the Norwegian central government the university is ready to play a bigger community role in Longyearbyen.
This is not as comfortable as it looks: First we perish in the cold. Now we’re getting crushed and gawked at because y’all weren’t content with Hell being the only warm place for us.
It’s bad enough climate change is screwing things up for pretty much every form of life in Svalbard, but now it’s keeping even the dead from resting in peace.
Icepeople is again facing an immediate existential crisis due (of course) to hardships largely inflected by the pandemic. In short, 1) the website needs $22 U.S. (190 NOK) to stay online for another month and 2) the editor needs any and all help possible to avoid homelessness in the middle of polar winter (not that it’s legal here any other time of the year).
So if you appreciate Icepeople for its unique stories about Svalbard and/or critical news during these critical times, as well as its features about the more colorful aspects of life here (today’s feature about the upcoming Polarjazz festival is for the event that first drew our editor’s attention to Svalbard way back in 2008) please do whatever you can during what are admittedly incredibly harsh times for many.
Thanks as always to everyone who makes The Coolest Newspaper On Earth possible!
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Nuggets of knowledge about the north from other normal newsies
Tuesday, March 10
Scanning Electron Microscopy image of typical deep-sea (bathyal) ostracod species from the study sites. Image courtesy of The University of Hong Kong.
Meltwater pulses (MWPs) known as abrupt sea-level rise due to injection of melt water are of particular interests to scientists to investigate the interactions between climatic, oceanic and glacial systems. Eustatic sea-level rise will inevitably affect cities especially those on coastal plains of low elevation like Hong Kong. A recent study published in Quaternary Science Reviews presented evidence of abrupt sea level change between 11,300–11,000 years ago in the Arctic Ocean. During the last deglaciation, melting of large ice sheets in the Northern hemisphere had contributed to profound global sea level changes. However, even the second largest MWP-1B is not well understood. Its timing and magnitude remain actively debated due to the lack of clear evidence not only from tropical areas recording near-eustatic sea-level change, but also from high-latitude areas where the ice sheets melted. The study presented evidence of abrupt sea level change between 11,300–11,000 years ago of 40m–80m in Svalbard. High time-resolution fossil records indicate a sudden temperature rise due to the incursion of warm Atlantic waters and consequent melting of the covering ice sheets. Because of the rebound of formerly suppressed lands underneath great ice load, the sedimentary environment changed from a bathyal setting at the study sites. This is the first solid evidence of relative sea-level change of MWP-1B discovered in ice-proximal areas.