National Snow and Ice Data Center

As climate change warms the Arctic more than twice as fast as the rest of the planet, new challenges abound for the communities that live in the region, including food sovereignty, coastal erosion, increasing shipping traffic and more. The National Science Foundation’s Navigating the New Arctic (NNA) initiative aims to improve our understanding of the rapid, dramatic changes taking place in the region in order to better mitigate these challenges. Beginning February 1, 2021, Alaska Pacific University (APU), the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF), and the University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder) will host the Navigating the New Arctic Community Office (NNA-CO). Over the next five years, these universities will work together to provide leadership and support to researchers and Arctic communities to address this region’s biggest climate-related threats.

In September 2018, NASA launched the Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2) to help scientists investigate why and how much the frozen parts of our world are changing as a result of global warming. This week, nearly two years after data initially became available to the public, downloads of data files from the satellite hit 10 million. All ICESat-2 data are housed and managed at the NASA National Snow and Ice Data Center Distributed Active Archive Center (NSIDC DAAC).