Green Options

Russia’s Security Council has authorized the creation of an Arctic special forces military to be deployed by the year 2020 to protect their interests in the Far North as new sources of natural resources become more available due to the decrease in ice cover.

In response to the rapid decline of Arctic sea ice in the last thirty years, the North Pacific Fishery Management Council has unanimously voted to prohibit fishing in nearly 200,000 square miles of Arctic waters.

Scientists have today warned that global warming could rapidly accelerate as millions of tons of methane escape from the arctic seabed. According to preliminary findings, as the Arctic region gets warmer massive deposits of the greenhouse gas - 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide - are rising to the surface.

Orjan Gustafsson of Stockholm University, one of the expedition’s leaders, said in an email from their Russian research ship that, for the first time, the team had discovered an extensive area of methane release so intense that “the methane did not have time to dissolve into the seawater but was rising as methane bubbles to the sea surface.” The team believe that the accelerated release is connected to rising temperatures throughout the Arctic region.

Two low-flying unmanned aircraft are cruising over Greenland this month to closely observe the melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet and its potential contribution to global sea level rise in the coming century. The flights will help scientists determine whether the ice sheet’s melt rate will accelerate in the future.

The drones are flying out of Ilulissat, half way up Greenland’s west coast, for three weeks through the end of this month. Scientists studying the rapidly vanishing Greenland ice sheet need to fill gaps in their data that was collected through satellite imagery.