Researchers at Durham University have drawn up the first ever 'Arctic Map' to show the disputed territories that states might lay claim to in the future.

An international group of scientists has swapped their comfortable offices for one of the most inhospitable environments on the planet to carry out a challenging field campaign that is seen as the key to ensuring the data delivered by ESA's ice mission CryoSat will be as accurate as possible.

For the first time, a German has taken part in a Russian drift expedition and has explored the atmosphere above the central Arctic during the polar night. Jürgen Graeser, a member of the Potsdam Research Unit of the Alfred-Wegener-Institute for Polar and Marine Research in the Helmholtz Association, has just returned home to Germany. As a member of the Russian expedition NP 35, which consisted of 21 persons, he has spent seven months on a drifting ice floe in the Arctic.

Using the latest satellite observations, NASA researchers and others report that the Arctic is still on “thin ice” when it comes to the condition of sea ice cover in the region. A colder-than-average winter in some regions of the Arctic this year has yielded an increase in the area of new sea ice, while the older sea ice that lasts for several years has continued to decline.

Rain falling on snow sounds like a relatively harmless weather event, but when it happens in the far north it can mean lingering death for reindeer, musk oxen and other animals that normally graze on the Arctic tundra.

Twenty-one boxes filled with 7,000 unique seed samples from more than 36 African nations were shipped to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a facility being built on a remote island in the Arctic Circle as a repository of last resort for humanity’s agricultural heritage.

Record-breaking amounts of ice-free water have deprived the Arctic of more of its natural "sunscreen" than ever in recent summers. The effect is so pronounced that sea surface temperatures rose to 5 C above average in one place this year, a high never before observed, says the oceanographer who has compiled the first-ever look at average sea surface temperatures for the region.

Scientists gathering evidence of ancient ice sheets uncovered a new mystery about what's happening on the Arctic sea floor today.

Unprecedented warm temperatures in the High Arctic this past summer were so extreme that researchers with a Queen’s University-led climate change project have begun revising their forecasts.

In the Earth's cold and icy far north, the harsh winters are giving way to spring weeks earlier than they did just a decade ago, researchers have reported in the June 19th issue of Current Biology, published by Cell Press. The finding in the Arctic, where the effects of global warming are expected to be most severe, offers an "early warning" of things to come on the rest of the planet, according to the researchers.

The global warming debate has focused on carbon dioxide emissions, but scientists at UC Irvine have determined that a lesser-known mechanism - dirty snow - can explain one-third or more of the Arctic warming primarily attributed to greenhouse gases.

Central Europe is not the only place where the past, warm winter has caused record temperatures. Unusually mild temperatures also prevented ice formation in the Arctic, specifically in the region around Spitsbergen. This is the conclusion drawn by scientists of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research and the German Aerospace Centre (DLR).