Antarctica & Arctic

"Federal judges appeared torn on Friday over the legality of the Trump administration’s effort to reopen millions of acres of Arctic waters for oil and gas development."

"Large territories of rivers, streams and tundra lands are covered by more than 20 thousands tons of diesel oil from a reservoir owned by company Nornickel. The catastrophe was reported to the authorities only two days after the spill and nobody really knows how to clean up."

"Russia’s state fishing agency said on Tuesday an Arctic river would need decades to recover after 20,000 tonnes of oil products spilled out of a power station in the industrial city of Norilsk last week."

"The bitterly cold Arctic winter typically snuffs out the seasonal wildfires that erupt in this region. But every once in a while, a wildfire comes along that refuses to die."

"A summer of extremes leaves sobering questions about the state of Earth’s largest store of ice, capable of inundating coastlines worldwide as it melts."

"Over the past week, as each thread of our ordinary existence unravels and travel feels like something we used to do, I’ve been holding tight to a single mental image. The deep brown gaze of a caribou calf as it passed inches from my face. The whites of its eyes as it glanced at me in surprise. The animal’s fear of the unknown dwarfed by its clarity of purpose."

"The about 100 researchers that on Tuesday set foot in Tromsø, Norway, will hardly be able to recognize the life they left in December."

"Scientists have found a new point of major vulnerability in the Antarctic ice sheet, in a region that already appears to be changing as the climate warms and has the potential to raise sea levels by nearly five feet over the long term."

"The polar ice caps are melting six times faster than in the 1990s, according to the most complete analysis to date."