Arctic Initiative

Arctic Initiative Postdoctoral Fellow Sarah Mackie gave a presentation to Girlguiding Newcastle (the equivalent of Girl Scouts in the UK), where she is a Ranger leader, about the Arctic, how climate change is affecting it, and what everyone (particularly children) can do to help.

Increased investment into the Arctic over the coming decades is inevitable. To respond to this, the Arctic's present international governance structures can be improved to help steer the region through these impending changes.

Climate change is opening Arctic sea lanes. With timely investment in green infrastructure, that could mean fewer — not more — emissions. Electrified ports would catalyze the greening of global shipping by supporting electric ships, a technology already benefiting from innovation.

Halla Hrund Logadóttir writes that an online education experiment which had been under development for years — at the speed of a medium-size turtle — became the new norm in an instant because of the COVID-19 disruption. 

Focusing on the situation in the Arctic, Drs. Sarah Dewey and Sarah Mackie from our Arctic Initiative will be discussing aspects of climate change in the Arctic, from the production of knowledge to how it can feed into positive policy solutions. They will also share stories of their academic paths and answer your questions about turning research into a career.

Joel Clement, a Mainer by birth, offers some words of advice before Donald Trump's proposed visit to Guilford, located in Maine's 2nd Congressional District, on June 5, 2020: Don't get played by out-of-state money that is pouring into Maine to politicize mask wearing and organize protests.

Cristine Russell details how the seasonal scientific field work in the Arctic — from the Toolik Field Station on Alaska's North Slope to ice core drilling in Greenland — is being postponed or cancelled this year because of the deadly COVID-19 pandemic.

Over the course of two days, the Greenland Policy Challenge teamed up students from the University Greenland with students from Harvard over Zoom to co-develop recommendations for Greenland's policy strategies in the fields of climate change, education and cultural preservation, foreign affairs and economics and trade. Student groups were paired with expert local Greenlandic mentors who offered guidance along the way.

Temperatures across the Arctic are increasing two to four times faster than the global average. The dramatic consequences that are already apparent include reduction of sea-ice cover, accelerating loss of land ice from glaciers and the Greenland Ice Sheet, proliferating wildfires, and—the topic of this panel—ongoing heating and thawing of the permafrost that underlies most of the land area of the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions across the globe

Joel Clement describes how the Arctic is transforming into a warmer, wetter, and less predictable climate state, what the consequences are for the Arctic's indigenous inhabitants, and what measures can be taken to build resilience.