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

By Liz O'Connell for Frontier Scientists

A Ponderosa Pine grove towers over my house roof.  The 100 foot trees grow naturally and swiftly east of the Cascades in Oregon.  Before Thanksgiving, extreme winds blew over the Cascade mountain barrier and whipped around central Oregon. The night after, I checked my yard from a window—dried pine needle & pine cone litter but nothing unusual.  I didn’t see it until I walked out into the yard.  A ten foot tree-top lay next to the house.

Hmm, I thought, looks like a Christmas Tree.

Close-up of the symbiotic vestimentiferan tubeworm Lamellibrachia luymesi from a cold seep at 550 m depth. The tubes are stained with a blue chitin stain to determine growth rates. Approximately 14 mo of growth is shown by the staining here: Charles Fisher in PLoS Biology: Public Library of Science

Laura Nielsen for Frontier Scientists

Deep sea oceans, once believed lifeless, teem with an astounding biodiversity.

Liz O'Connell for Frontier Scientists

James Cameron seamlessly merged the movie-making world with the science world in his talk at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) December annual conference in San Francisco.  While movie goers suspend disbelief as they immerse themselves into this director’s blockbuster worlds in The Abyss, Alien, Avatar, and Titanic, skeptical scientists need the proof, the method, and evidence of ground breaking discoveries to be impressed.

The Mariana Trench

Matching the deepest dive record in the Mariana trench

Snowmobiles: Osopolar

Liz O'Connell for Frontier Scientists

Who isn’t thirsty when it comes to good prose? Ongoing San Francisco’s Writers With Drinks mixes it up Saturday, December 8, 2012, at the Make-Out Room, 7:30pm.

Ned Rozell, science writer from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, will read from his book Finding Mars.

NASA Mars Rover Curiosity: inflatable model

Laura Nielsen for Frontier Scientists

After snapping a few photos with the full-size inflatable model of the Curiosity rover, I went directly to the Discovery Dome, an inflatable planetarium. “We Choose Space!” was playing, a planetary show about human space exploration. A 360° panorama of the moon greeted me, an astronaut to one side, the moon buggy to another, and pristine moon dust under a black starry sky all around. The moon explorer talking about his experience spoke with the same reverence as John Muir held when he spoke about what is now Yosemite National Park. Sitting inside and staring up, just as much in wonder as all the little children and their families sharing the space, I felt awed by all that we have accomplished and the discoveries to come.

I was attending the Exploration Station

by Marie Thoms

Artists and scientists often share a common goal: making the invisible visible. Yet artistically talented students, especially girls, often shy away from scientific careers.

A new four-year program led by the University of Alaska Fairbanks blends the art, biology and physics of color into a series of summer academies, science cafes and activity kits designed to inspire art-interested students to enter careers in science.

“Research suggests that girls who gravitate toward art often have strong visual-spatial abilities that would serve them well in science careers,”

Nesting Black Guillemots: © Copyright Ross and licensed for reuse under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license. Part of the Geograph project.

Laura Nielsen for Frontier Scientists

The Bering Sea region hosts over 90% of seabirds breeding in the continental United States. Most of those birds are hardy migrators, breeding on Alaska's coast in the warm season and then departing south, chased away by the cold weather. One group which remains is Guillemots, a type of seabird species which belongs to the auks -- the family includes murres, murrelets, auklets and puffins.

Guillemots are special. They don't migrate

by Ned Rozell

HALL ISLAND — On this windy, misty August day, there are perhaps one million birds clinging to the cliffs that buttress this Bering Sea island. These seabirds, crazy-eyed and with bodies both sleek and clumsy, need solid ground for just a few months to hold their eggs. When their summer mission is complete, the birds scatter to the vastness of the sea.

Fairbanks, Alaska, November 6, 2012-- The Arctic Region Supercomputing Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks

by Marie Thoms

University of Alaska Fairbanks scientists have identified what they think is the ancestral trait that allowed for the evolution of air breathing in vertebrates. They presented their research at the 42nd annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience Oct. 17 in New Orleans.

“To breathe air with a lung, you need more than a lung, you need neural circuitry that is sensitive to carbon dioxide,”

North Polar Map: Adolf Stielers Handatlas 1891

Laura Nielsen for Frontier Scientists

Over eight thousand historical maps of Alaska are now available to the public through the United States Geological Survey's Historical Topographic Map Collection. The collection includes maps of Alaska crafted as long ago as 1899

Brooks Range from Alaska National Wildlife Refuge: Photo courtesy U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service

Laura Nielsen for FrontierScientists

We know that the Arctic holds unique climate conditions and a complex carbon balance. Tundra fires and thawing permafrost release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, while unique ocean currents and cold waters prompt higher levels of ocean acidification. Methane emerges from sea and soil. The Arctic sea ice cover shrinks to increasingly startling extents. Plant life changes in response to altered conditions, and wildlife struggles to adapt. Understanding Arctic systems is a vital piece of climate science that can provide policy makers the knowledge they need to predict and manage biological systems in an increasingly climate-uncertain world, yet the remote locations and harsh conditions of the Arctic create challenges for scientists.

Visit Alaska's remote Toolik Field Station, where hundreds of scientists undertake research projects in the field.

Clown fish at Sharm El Naga beach: Photographer Dino van Doorn (Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license)

Will ocean acidification spell a watery grave for vital parts of marine ecosystems? Marine ecologist Jane Lubchenco, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, named ocean acidification global warming's "equally evil twin." *

Burning fossil fuels — coal, oil, natural gas — cutting down forests and other post-industrial revolution human activities have added more than 500 billion tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) to the atmosphere over the last 200 years. This anthropogenic (human-caused) increase in CO2 and other greenhouse gasses continues to influence dangerous climate change. The ocean acts as a carbon sink, meaning that it absorbs CO2 from the atmosphere. This causes ocean acidification

Fairbanks, Alaska, October 2, 2012-- “As Alaska’s Research University UAF (University of Alaska Fairbanks) must continue to provide the best tools, ARSC is one of the most important tools available,” said Brian Rogers, Chancellor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. And the Arctic Region Supercomputing Center’s new tool is a Cray supercomputer dubbed “Fish.” Watch the video a Cray Supercomputer Called Fish.

by Ned Rozell

As the northern end of the globe nods away from the sun at fall equinox, the amount of sea ice floating on the northern oceans is now at the lowest amount ever detected by satellites, a period that goes back to 1979. This new sea-ice minimum follows an extremely cold Alaska winter that led to the formation of thick ice off the northern coast. In spring 2012, it looked like old times for ice floating off northern Alaska.

Matt Druckenmiller tows a sled over sea ice in Barrow this spring. His sled contained instruments that measured the thickness of the ice: Photo courtesy Hajo Eicken.

Ice cores loaded onto a plane in Antarctica: Photo by Heidi Roop (PolarTREC 2010), Courtesy of ARCUS

This week is International Polar Week, September 16 - 22, 2012. The event coincides with the Fall Equinox, when 12 hours of daylight will light every location on the planet. Polar Week aims to involve the public with research going on in the Artic and Antarctic through educational activities and engaging webinars. Do you know any students who would benefit from learning about polar science? You can find free activities and resources

by Ned Rozell

It’s not often that glaciologists help with the recovery of long-lost human remains, but military officials recently enlisted Martin Truffer for that purpose. The University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute professor and graduate student Dave Podrasky came up with useful information on a Southcentral glacier that held plane wreckage and the remains of military men killed in a crash 60 years ago.

Colony Glacier, about 50 miles east of Anchorage, flows beneath the impact point of a military transport plane that crashed into 10,000-foot Mount Gannett in 1952. Because the accident site is so remote and rugged, no one had been able to recover the plane or the remains of its crew and passengers. Over time, Colony Glacier has churned the accident debris 14 miles

Fairbanks, Alaska, September 4, 2012--- Three videos introduce the oceanographic modeling work from the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF). The video Modeling Ice in the Arctic, shows a regional ice model coupled with a global climate model.

Spruce fire in Kenai National Wildlife Refuge: U.S. Fish & Wildlife photo by Karen Murphy