The ozone hole is the region over Antarctica with total ozone of 220 Dobson Units or lower. This map shows the Antarctic ozone hole as of September 22, 2012. : Courtesy: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

Laura Nielsen for Frontier Scientists

The ozone hole is a problem which plagues the skies above Antarctica. Yet in 2011, Arctic skies experienced the most severe ozone depletion ever measured in the north. The reasons why are now explained

[] Mount Cleveland viewed from the air (May 31, 2012). / Photography by Cyrus Read. Courtesy the Alaska Volcano Observatory and U.S. Geological Survey []
(Editor's Note: At the time of posting, the Anchorage Daily News image directory is malfunctioning. Volcano images can be viewed at the original article on FrontierScientists.)

Laura Nielsen for Frontier Scientists

On Saturday May 4th the Alaska Volcano Observatory detected a series of low-level explosions at Cleveland volcano.

The Chelyabinsk meteorite flew over Russia early in the morning of Feb 15 2013. It exploded above Chelyabinsk city, damaging buildings. Hundreds were injured due mostly to flying glass. Photo, taken shortly after the blast, shows the meteorite's trace.: By Alex Alishevskikh (Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license)

by Ned Rozell

Near a small village in Russia, Marina Ivanova stepped into cross-country skis and kicked toward a hole in the snow. The meteorite specialist with the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History and Vernadsky Institute in Moscow was hunting for fragments of the great Chelyabinsk Meteorite

Gígjökull is an outlet glacier extending from the volcano Eyjafjallajökull in Iceland.: Attribution: Andreas Tille ( Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported, 2.5 Generic, 2.0 Generic and 1.0 Generic license.)

Laura Nielsen for Frontier Scientists

Researchers have combed through the last 2,000 years of climate records. Their assessment affirms that a persistent long-term cooling trend concluded in the late 19th century, reversed by global warming.

Overview of the Alaska region: Generated by GINA, image by VIIRS

by Liz O'Connell for Frontier Scientists During winter in the Arctic it’s “night” almost all the time, but thanks to the new Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) Day/Night Band (DNB) we no longer have to be in the dark about what’s going on with the weather.

by Ned Rozell

The blackened scars that Alaska fires leave on the landscape may result in more lightning, more rain in some areas just downwind of the scars, and less rain farther away, according to two scientists.

Nicole Mölders and Gerhard Kramm, both of the Geophysical Institute at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, study how changes in landscapes affect the weather. After Alaska’s fire season in 2004, when smoke befouled much of the air Alaskans breathed and a collective area the size of Vermont burned, the scientists wondered how all that charred country would affect local weather patterns.

The researchers used MM5, a computer model based at Penn State University and the National Center for Atmospheric Research, to simulate conditions on the ground and in the air above it. They compared the surface of Alaska before and after Alaska’s record fire season, in which 6.72 million acres burned. The model told them that fire scars larger than 250,000 acres—about the space taken up by the five boroughs of New York City—have an impact on weather close to the fire scar.

A fire scar in the making near Venetie, Alaska on June 24, 2004.: Image courtesy U.S. Geological Survey and Geographic Information Network of Alaska.

“There’s more rain locally, in the lee side of the scar and then less precipitation farther out,”

Eagle River Valley near Anchorage, Alaska: By Frank Kovalchek (Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License)

Laura Nielsen for FrontierScientists

The face of the Arctic is changing as plant growth flourishes further north than before. According to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), "Temperature and vegetation growth at northern latitudes now resemble those found 4 degrees to 6 degrees of latitude farther south as recently as 1982." This change accompanies the ongoing anthropogenic climate change associated with our warming world. Satellite data from the past 30 years helped researchers understand the vegetative change, and the findings were presented in Nature Climate Change

Liz O'Connell for Frontier Scientists

“Ancient ice is melting and yielding many things we haven’t seen before,” said Jeanne Schaaf, National Park Service archaeologist

Permafrost-caused polygons in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.: Courtesy U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

by Ned Rozell

Kenji Yoshikawa will soon sleep on brilliant, blue-white landscape that has never felt the imprint of his boots. Beginning on spring equinox, the permafrost scientist and a partner will attempt to drive snowmachines from Prudhoe Bay to Canada’s Baffin Island.

While traveling a distance equal to Seattle to Tokyo to Seattle over land and sea ice, Yoshikawa will camp outside villages in an Arctic Oven tent. Along the way, stopping at village schools in Canada’s far north, he will drill holes in the ground and snake in strings of thermometers to record permafrost temperatures.

By Liz O'Connell for Frontier Scientists

“By dating ash,” said Richard Vanderhoek, “an archaeological site in Alaska, can be placed on a chronostratographic timeline.”  Or in other words: the chemical makeup of the ash, matched with a volcano eruption, will provide an approximate date of the site.  Archaeologists worldwide have dated ancient sites for the last half century in this manner.

Volcanic Ash Layers

A coronal mass ejection (CME) erupting into space, travelling at speeds over 900 miles per second. CMEs which connect with Earth's magnetosphere cause auroras to appear: Courtesy National Aeronautics and Space Administration

by Ned Rozell

Sometimes, after idling in the sky for hours as a greenish glow, the aurora catches fire, erupting toward the magnetic north pole in magnificent chaos that can last for three hours. “Substorms,” as space physicists call them, can happen two or three times each night.

The man who came up with that name half a century ago has, with a former student he once mentored, come up with a new theory on the location of heavenly energy for these auroras.

Research team investigating sea ice habitat at ice station: Courtesy: Alfred Wegener Institute

Laura Nielsen for Frontier Scientists

The Arctic hosts a complex ecosystem, sensitive to the alterations in our changing world. Algae is part of that biome, growing in strands which hang down from the edge of ice floes. New conditions have caused an explosion in the growth rate of the algae Melosira arctica, which will influence Arctic life in ways we can't predict with certainty.

2012's summer season saw the lowest Arctic ice extent on satellite record. Arctic sea ice volume has also dropped.

Fairbanks, seen here at minus 40 during January 2012, is one of many Alaska places that — unlike most of the world — leaned to the cold side during the first decade of the 2000s.: Photo by Ned Rozell.

by Ned Rozell

This just in: 2012 was the coldest year of the new century in Fairbanks, and the second coldest here in the last 40 years.

Fairbanks isn’t the only chilly place in Alaska. Average temperatures at 19 of 20 long-term National Weather Service stations displayed a cooling trend from 2000 to 2010, according a recent study written up by Gerd Wendler, Blake Moore and Lian Chen of the Alaska Climate Research Center.

The rest of the world has not been going Alaska’s way. For the 36th consecutive year, the yearly global temperature in 2012 was warmer than average.

Adult female walruses on Chukchi Sea ice floe with young.: Courtesy USGS, photographer S.A. Sonsthagen

Laura Nielsen for Frontier Scientists

Sea ice is the foundation of an entire Arctic ecosystem. Algae flourishes where the ice is active, providing sustenance for hordes of zooplankton. Birds feed on schools of small fish sustained by the zooplankton. There are species of seabirds which live here and nowhere else, and others whose natural rhythms are dictated by presence or absence of ice. Fish populations support a variety of seals and larger fish. Bowhead whales filter-feed on tiny zooplankton, while orcas prowl for bigger prey. All these organisms live and die, drifting down to the seafloor where their detritus helps make a new meal for bottom-dwellers like mollusks and tubeworms.

Large walrus on Bering Sea ice. (Odobenus rosmarus divergens): Courtesy NOAA, photographer Captain Budd Christman

Walruses live here. Blubberous and ungainly on land, adroit swimmers in water, the big toothy pinnipeds are iconic in the cold north, an Arctic keystone species.

Ice heaves can cause mounds in permafrost. Pictured are partially melted and collapsed mounds forming stone circles in Svalbard, northern Norway.: Attribution: Hannes Grobe (Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic License)

Laura Nielsen for Frontier Scientists

Carbon is the building block of life.

Our knowledge of current climate change, however, has us counting how much carbon enters the atmosphere. We burn fossil fuels, adding anthropogenic (human-caused) carbon dioxide to the air. Meanwhile, natural processes also add carbon to the air. We know that methane can arise from warming lakes and oceans. Methane traps heat roughly twenty times as efficiently as does carbon dioxide. Methane and carbon dioxide are also hiding in permafrost, the layers of frozen soil found in very cold places like the Arctic. Permafrost layers can measure up to 5,000 feet thick.

One gigaton equals one million tons. Earth’s current atmosphere holds about 850 gigatons of Carbon. Permafrost is estimated to hold 1,400 gigatons of Carbon.

Permafrost has a misleading name. As our world warms, permafrost that has lasted tens of thousands of years or more is beginning to melt.

by Ned Rozell

As she scraped cold dirt from the remains of an extinct bison, Pam Groves wrinkled her nose at a rotten-egg smell wafting from gristle that still clung to the animal’s bones. She lifted her head to scan the horizon, wary of bears that might be attracted to the flesh of a creature that gasped its last breath 40,000 years ago.

In the type of discovery they have dreamed about for years, Groves and Dan Mann, both researchers at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, in summer 2012 found in the thawing bank of a northern river almost the entire skeleton of a steppe bison that died during the last ice age.

Bowhead Whale (Balaena mysticetus) fluke, Foxe Basin in Nunavut, Canada: by Ansgar Walk (Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License)

Laura Nielsen for Frontier Scientists

Each spring, wildlife biologist Craig George stands where shore-bound sea ice meets open water at Point Barrow and counts whales. Barrow Alaska is the northernmost town in the united states. The lookout point, accessed daily via snowmobile, is no more than a canvas windbreak atop a pile of ice. Warming spring temperatures thin and break apart the near-coastal sea ice just north of Barrow, forming a narrow open passage preferred by migrating whales. And for eight weeks beginning in early April, Craig George and other researchers working with the North Slope Borough's Department of Wildlife brave the arctic weather, straining to spot glimpses of Bowhead Whales.

The Mesa Site in northwest Alaska: Photo courtesy Mike Kunz

by Ned Rozell

Alaska was once the setting for an environmental shift so dramatic it forced people to evacuate the entire North Slope, according to Michael Kunz, an archaeologist with the Bureau of Land Management.

About 10,000 years ago, a group of hunting people lived on the North Slope

Ice Melt: (Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license) Attribution: Mike Pennington

Laura Nielsen for Frontier Scientists

Imagine yourself on a Colorado mountain slope. Bumblebees buzz happily around dwarf bluebell blossoms, and the spring sun is bright. Except not all is well. The flowers bloom a good seven hundred feet upslope of where they grew five years ago, forcing bees ever higher. Bright petal colors are faded: the flowers are past their prime, plants already flagging.

by Ned Rozell

Northern sea ice is at its lowest extent since we've been able to see it from satellites. Greenland experienced its warmest summer in 170 years. Eight of 10 permafrost-monitoring sites in northern Alaska recorded their highest temperatures; the other two tied record highs.

2012 was a year of “astounding” change for much of the planet north of the Arctic Circle