The Latest Breaking News from the Arctic Ocean

Analysis of samples from an expedition to the Arctic Ocean suggest that marine microbes could be a promising new source of antibiotics.

Jimmy Graham is part of a team that will row across the Arctic Ocean in 2025

The Arctic’s climate is warming at least four times faster than the global average, causing irrevocable changes to this vast landscape and precarious ecosystem – from the anticipated extinction of polar bears to the appearance of killer whales in ever-greater numbers. A new study suggests the Arctic Ocean could be…

Considerable effort has been invested in determining when the Arctic Ocean might first become ice-free in summer, a.k.a. a “blue ocean event” and defined as when the sea ice area drops below 1 million sq. km. We don’t know exactly when the last blue ocean event happened, but one in…

The Arctic Ocean could be ice-free in summer by the 2030s, even if we do a good job of reducing emissions between now and then. That’s the worrying conclusion of a new study in Nature Communications.

Last summer, we travelled to the remote Arctic Hausgarten observatory area in the eastern Fram Strait (west of Svalbard, Norway) on a research ship. The samples we collected there included ice cores, sea water and ice algae from large packs of floating ice called ice floes. These form 1–2 metre…

Sea ice covered 5.64 million square miles of the Arctic Ocean at the ice’s peak extent this year in early March. That’s almost 400,000 square miles less than the median coverage level at other March peaks between 1981 and 2010, according to the National Snow & Ice Data Center at…

The move to limit oil drilling in 16 million acres in Alaska and the Arctic Ocean comes as regulators prepare to decide on the Willow project, a controversial plan pushed by ConocoPhillips.

President Joe Biden will announce on Monday new protections against oil drilling in Alaska and the Arctic Ocean