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Category: News & Press Releases

Arctic Portal News Portlet

  • PAGE21 researchers meet in Abisko

    PAGE21 researchers meet in Abisko

    PAGE21 young researchers meet in Abisko, northern Sweden

    Today, Sunday the 22nd of September, permafrost young researchers gathered in Abisko during the 2nd Page21 General Assembly Young Researchers workshop.

    Scientists are being part of PAGE21 project which is is a Large-scale integrating collaborative project under the ENV call topic “Vulnerability of Arctic permafrost to climate change and implications for global GHG emissions and future climate” (ENV.2011.1.1.3-1) coordinated by Professor Hans-Wolfgang Hubberten from AWI.

    Young researchers discussed several topics to include protocols and data management, general challenges in permafrost research as well as cooperation with Page21´s Canadian partner – ADAPT.

    Presentation on project´s communication and outreach strategies was given to inform about great success of this summer´s blogs that were written by young researchers during their work in the Arctic field sites.

    Blog have received over 10 000 entries during few months and the number is still growing.
    Arctic Portal who is hosting PAGE21 website and administrating Work Package 1: ´´Communication and Outreach´´ decided to keep on with blogs project to bring even more awareness to important permafrost research.

    At the beginning of next month both partners will also start new series of Young Researchers Profiles in order to bring more recognition to scientists committed to the project.

    After indoor part of the workshop, group of scientists attended field exercises.

    Young scientists will attend PAGE21 General Assembly that starts tomorrow and lasts until Tuesday.

  • Polar Sea: A Filmmaker’s Journey

    Polar Sea: A Filmmaker’s Journey

    North West Passage documentary team

    We are happy to announce that permafrost drilling team from Herschel Island got a deserved recognition and was accompanied by the Doc Studio – an online community for documentary filmmakers.

    Arctic Portal, together with PAGE21 and Herschel Island permafrost team is happy to introduce its readers to the blog from the shoot for “The Polar Sea”.

    Documentary film will be launched later this year and it will consist of 10 episodes of multi – media expedition through the Northwest Passage.

    The blog is being written by, Dylan Reibling -Director of the Herschel Island shoot for “The Polar Sea.” He’s also an award-winning filmmaker and interactive artist.

    His work ranges from documentary, stop-motion animation and narrative films to interactive prototypes. His films have travelled to 50 international film festivals. His most recent short film “Record” has been featured at 20 film festivals around the world – including screenings at the Toronto International Film Festival, the Tribeca Film Festival, and the British Film Institute. Dylan won Best Director (fiction) at the 2009 Yorkton Film Festival.

  • From Alaska to Iceland: six years later

    From Alaska to Iceland: six years later

    HOF - Culture House in Akureyri and the conference venue

    Once again, after highly successful 2007 Arctic Energy Summit and Technology Conference, The Institute of the North, together with its Icelandic partner – the Arctic Portal, is organizing The 2013 Arctic Energy Summit.

    The event will take place 8th – 10th October in Akureyri, northern Iceland and relate to thematic areas such as richness, resilience and responsibility. More information about the conference and its topics is available here.

    Foe those, who do not remember, the first Arctic Energy Summit was held in 2007 in Anchorage, Alaska and gathered close to 300 representatives from 13 different countries.
    The technology conference provided a forum for the presentation of international, interdisciplinary technical research papers on the Arctic as an emerging province.

    Presentations covered fields of extractive energy, rural power and sustainability of energy in the Arctic. To read more about topics covered by Arctic Energy Summit 2007, please visit the IoN Website.

    This year´s speakers will include David J.Hayes, Deputy Secretary of the Department of the Interior in the United States, David Garman, the former Under Secretary of Energy at the U.S. Department of Energy, and Aqqaluk Lynge, the former President of the Inuit Circumpolar Council (ICC) and its current international Chair.

  • Arctic Week in Iceland coming soon

    Arctic Week in Iceland coming soon

    Arctic Week in Iceland

    October of 2013 presents an excellent opportunity to visit Iceland and attend two exciting Arctic conferences, held back to back in one of Europe’s hottest travel destinations.

    Visitors will have the chance to travel around the country as the Arctic Energy Summit (8-10 October) is held in the town of Akureyri in the north of Iceland, while the Arctic Circle assembly (12-14 October) will take place in the southern capital, Reykjavík.

    This provides the perfect opportunity to discover Iceland while attending two high-level international Arctic conferences – engaging in an important dialogue on the future of the Arctic – all in one trip.

    Several opportunities around the conferences give visitors an opportunity to experience Iceland, including familiar hotspots such as the Blue Lagoon or the Golden Circle, as well as the Lonely Planet’s top destination of 2013, Northern Iceland, with its boiling mud pools, erupting geysers, waterfalls and unique landscapes. The welcoming hospitality of Icelanders allows visitors to have a relaxing but exciting time wherever they go.

    The imagination is the only limitation of an Icelandic experience!

    Click here for more information about the conference.

    SOURCES

    Arctic Energy Summit 2013

    See also:

    Arctic Portal Library

    Arctic Portal Mapping System

  • New series of PAGE21 live blogs

    New series of PAGE21 live blogs

    Stefanie and Young Sound Fjord in the background Kjersti Gisnås

    PAGE21 young researchers have just started their fall season of permafrost investigation in remote areas, located in the northern hemisphere. So far we have received interesting writings from Samoylov and Zackenberg, located in North – East Greenland.

    While collecting data on permafrost temperature, CO2 and CH4 fluxes, delegates from all the research stations, explain the particularity of the research done at each site. What is more they describe adventures, dangers and exciting daily life in remote Arctic locations.

    PAGE21 Blogs are available for the public and can be accessed here.

    PAGE21 project aims to understand and quantify the vulnerability of permafrost environments to a changing global climate, and to investigate the feedback mechanisms associated with increasing greenhouse gas emissions from permafrost zones.

    This research will make use of a unique set of Arctic permafrost investigations performed at stations that span the full range of Arctic bioclimatic zones. The project will bring together the best European permafrost researchers and eminent scientists from Canada, Russia, the USA, and Japan.

    The PAGE21 is a Large-scale integrating collaborative project under the ENV call topic “Vulnerability of Arctic permafrost to climate change and implications for global GHG emissions and future climate” (ENV.2011.1.1.3-1) coordinated by Professor Hans-Wolfgang Hubberten from AWI.

    Sources

    PAGE21

  • Arctic Circle now FREE of charge

    Arctic Circle now FREE of charge

    Arctic Circle

    We are pleased to announce further collaboration between the Arctic Energy Summit and the Arctic Circle. Anyone that is registered for the 2013 Arctic Energy Summit will also be able to attend the inaugural Arctic Circle that will be held 12-14 October in Reykjavik, Iceland FREE OF CHARGE.

    To find out more about the Arctic Circle, explore their website at www.ArcticCircle.org and watch the promotional video at http://vimeo.com/72587962.

    If you are interested in attending the Arctic Circle, please email or call Geoff Cooper at gcooper@institutenorth.org or 1(907) 786-4663 so that we can let the Arctic Circle organizers know.

    If you have already paid to attend the Arctic Circle, please contact the event organizers by email at info@ArcticCircle.org. If you have not yet registered for the Arctic Energy Summit, you can register now and check the box for free registration to the Arctic Circle.

    We also want to remind you about the optional energy tour that will take place on 11 October. This exciting tour will visit several of Iceland’s remarkable energy developments while traveling from the site of the Arctic Energy Summit in Akureyri to Reykjavik where the Arctic Circle will begin the following day. For more information, please see the details and online registration here.

    SOURCES

    Arctic Circle

    Arctic Energy Summit

  • Cairn Energy plans to drill in Greenland

    Cairn Energy plans to drill in Greenland

    arctic landscape

    Cairn Energy, one of Europe´s leading independent oil and gas exploration and development companies, has revealed their long term plans for exploration drilling programme, which may involve in resuming activity off Greenland.

    If the company goes ahead with their plans of exploration and exploitation in Greenland, it could mean that they resume drilling operations in the Pitu field by the second half of next year.

    To date, the Edinburgh-based explorer’s drilling programme off Greenland has not been fruitful and had been widely criticized by environmentalists.

    In the firm’s latest half-yearly report it raised its total programme target to an accumulative figure of over four million barrels.

    Chief Executive Simon Thomson explained that the company will commence a year-long multi-well frontier exploration programme as of September that will give shareholders ongoing exposure to the potential for material growth.

    Cairn’s current inventory is made up of 144 leads and 62 prospects in the frontier basins off Morocco, Mauritania, Senegal, Spain, Ireland and Greenland, and the more mature Norwegian Continental Shelf and UK and Norwegian North Sea.

    SOURCES

    Ice News

    See also:

    Arctic Portal Library

    Arctic Portal Mapping System

  • Arctic Energy Summit coming soon

    Arctic Energy Summit coming soon

    Autumn in Akureyri

    The Arctic is sometimes described as the last frontier in the development of energy resources.

    The Institute of the North’s Arctic Energy Summit will explore energy as a fundamental element of the sustainable development of the Arctic as a lasting frontier.

    Central to this concept is how a focus on richness, resilience and responsibility will provide a pathway for sustainable energy development in the Arctic and for Arctic communities.

    The 2013 Arctic Energy Summit is a multi-disciplinary event expected to draw several hundred industry officials, scientists, academics, policy makers, energy professionals and community leaders together to collaborate and share leading approaches on Arctic energy issues.

    The 2013 Summit will address energy extraction, production and transmission in the Arctic as it relates to three thematic areas and key questions, including richness, resilience, and responsibility.

    Keynote speakers will include Mr Aqqaluk Lynge, representative of Alaskan Inuit, Mr David Garman, former Under Secretary of Energy at the U.S. Department of Energy and Mr. Christopher R. Sauer who is President and CEO and a founding member of Ocean Renewable Power Company.

    Arctic Energy Summit 2013 will become gathering for media representatives from all over the world in order to raise the awareness about current energy – related issues in changing Arctic.

    Watch and share introductory video prepared by Akureyri reginal TV station N4.

    Beautiful town of Akureyri, located in the northern Iceland is a center of culture, leisure and education. With a population of about 18 000, the town is by far the largest outside the Reykjavik capital area.

    Conference organizers still welcome participants to register for the event. More information can be found on the Conference Website.

    Sources

    Arctic Energy Summit 2013

    See also:

    Arctic Portal Library

    Arctic Portal Mapping System

  • Post-doctoral position available

    Post-doctoral position available

    research site

    A Post-doctoral position on high-latitude land surface modelling within the Department of Applied Environmental Science (ITM) and the Bolin Centre for Climate Research is open for applications. The deadline is the 3rd of September.

    The main focus of the work will be on including near-surface vegetation functions into the terrestrial ecosystem model JSBACH. Two aspects are important: The representation of plant physiological processes being responsible for the vegetation distribution as well as hydrological processes in the moss layer which have impacts on the soil hydrological and thermal regime.

    Field observations (e.g. physical properties and carbon profile data, eddy covariance heat and carbon fluxes) and large-scale observational datasets (e.g. remote sensing products, atmospheric inversion of trace gas fluxes) will be important for a calibration and validation of the model. Then, such new modelling tool can be used to investigate past, current and future ecosystem functions in relation to environmental change.

    This is a full-time, initial 1-year position with the possibility of one year extension. The expected starting date is after agreement.

    More information available here.

  • Start of the NRF Open Assembly

    Start of the NRF Open Assembly

    Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson at the NRF Open Assembly

    The NRF Open Assembly started in Akureyri this morning. Its theme is: Climate Change in Northern Territories, Sharing Experiences, Exploring New Methods and Assessing Socio-Economic Impacts.

    Click here to see the conference program.

    Pictures from day 1.

    The conference started with words of welcome from Rector Stefán B. Sigurðsson, Professor Lassi Heininen and Professor Grétar Þór Eyþórsson.

    But one of the highlights was the opening speech of Mr. Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson, president of Iceland.

    He mentioned that now the eleven biggest economies in the world are now linked to the Arctic through the Arctic Council, amongst them the biggest Co2 emission countries in the world.

    He also welcomed interest from Arctic outsiders due to their work on climate change and their resource knowledge on related issues.

    He demonstrated that China sent an icebreaker across the Arctic in 2012, conducting scientific research, confirming severe consequences of climate change. Consequently the weather in China in January and February was one of the worst in recent years, directly impacted by the Arctic changes.

    Keynote sessions will continue over the two-day conference.

    Recording will be available after the conference.