NASA’s Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2) successfully launched from California at 9:02 a.m. EDT Saturday, embarking on its mission to measure the ice of Earth’s frozen reaches with unprecedented accuracy. ICESat-2 lifted off from Space Launch Complex-2 at Vandenberg Air Force Base on United Launch Alliance’s final Delta II rocket. Ground stations in […]
About 160 years ago, U.S. Secretary of State William Seward was taking some heat for his significant role in the purchase of Alaska. On the day the Russians received the $7.2 million check, a group of white travelers were at Nulato, getting ready for an upriver trip to Fort Yukon to explore this strange land. […]
In August 2016, the first large cruise ship traveled through the Northwest Passage, the northern waterway linking the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. The following year, the first ship without an icebreaker plied the Northern Sea Route, a path along Russia’s Arctic coast that was, until recently, impassable by unescorted commercial vessels. In recent decades parts of the Arctic seas […]
Dear Reader, The Arctic Ocean maybe the smallest and shallowest, but its importance and relevance are increasingly critical; the science tells us that the Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet. That means sea ice, a vital component of Arctic marine ecosystems, could disappear by 2040. But it gets worse, […]