Science and Environment

“This is a very new type of model which simulates each piece of the ice flow, like little polygons moving around,” Zhang said. “So, when I first saw that model, I said, ‘Oh, this is really cool. It can be really useful for coastal communities to get the sense of how the ice moves around.’”

For the first time, however, researchers in two northern Alaska communities want to study how electric vehicles, including electric snowmachines, could be incorporated into their isolated power grids.

“What we see in the Arctic is that plants will take [mercury] up and then store it, and when they die, rather than decaying and re-releasing that mercury, they're actually frozen and stored in the permafrost,” Smith said. “So you have this big accumulation in stores of mercury in permafrost.”

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced earlier this week that it had reached a settlement with the operators of the Red Dog Mine for nearly two dozen hazardous waste violations.

Dowitchers have nearly a thousand mile-nesting range, from the Y-K Delta to Utqiaġvik. Kotzebue is of particular interest to the researchers because it hosts two distinct bird populations. Bathrick says little is known about the groups.

“It's getting faster and more dramatic. So there's quite a bit of change,” Grosse said. “We see lake change. Lots of lakes are draining in this region over the last years.”

Although sheefish are abundant now, they could be threatened by warming Arctic temperatures, according to Bill Carter, a fish biologist for the Selawik National Wildlife Refuge, based in Kotzebue. His focus is on the refuge’s aquatic habitat. For eight years, he and a group of Fish and Wildlife colleagues studied a potential threat to sheefish: the permafrost thaw slump.

The sharp decline in the season length can be directly linked to the decline in sea ice due to a warming climate. That’s the finding of a new collaborative study conducted by the Native Village of Kotzebue and the International Arctic Research Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

U.S. researchers are normally restricted to U.S. boundaries. Researcher Paul Conn with NOAA says that the process can be limiting since the polar bears travel between sea ice in both Russia and the United States.

The University of Alaska Fairbanks has found evidence that warming waters outside the Arctic are impacting sea ice as well.