Arctic Links

It is hard to keep up with all the Arctic stories happening at the moment amidst all the other news on the environment front with Fukushima, 25 years of Chernobyl and a year since Deep Water Horizon. Let me make up for having neglected the Arctic a little while I was busy on other things by passing on a few links.
At the Oil Spill Response conference for the future in Trondheim, (see earlier entries) I had the pleasure to meet John Farrel, Executive Director of the US Arctic Research Commission. I interviewed him about oil exploration in the Arctic, which I will make available at a later date. The website of that organisation is worth following.
The English website of Germany’s Alfred Wegener Institute for polar and marine studies has several interesting if worrying stories about coastal erosion in the Arctic, record depletion of the ozone layer over the Arctic and a significant increase in the freshwater content of the Arctic Ocean.
Icy Meltwater Pooling in Arctic Ocean: A Wild Card in Climate Change Scenarios is also worth reading on this topic. The findings are from the CLAMER project, a collaboration of 17 European institutes with the difficult but important task of synthesizing the research of almost 300 projects funded by the EU over the last 13 years, relating to climate change and Europe’s oceans.
That should provide ice blog fans with some interesting reading while I have a few days off enjoying the definitely ice-free weather of this western European April. More in May, although I will look out for your questions or comments as usual.