Arctic sea ice has likely reached its minimum extent for the year, at 3.74 million square kilometers (1.44 million square miles) on September 15, 2020, according to scientists at the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) at the University of Colorado Boulder. The 2020 minimum is the second lowest in the nearly 42-year satellite record. 

The concentration of mercury in fish in Alaska’s Yukon River may exceed EPA mercury criterion by 2050 if greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming are not constrained, according to new scientific research led by the National Snow and Ice Data Center’s (NSIDC) Kevin Schaefer. This first of its kind research estimates potential releases of mercury from thawing permafrost in high and low emissions scenarios. The researchers predict that by 2200, the mercury emitted into the atmosphere annually by thawing permafrost could compare with current global anthropogenic emissions under a high emissions scenario. Their results were published on September 16 in Nature Communications. 

How is coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) affecting Indigenous Peoples’ access to food? National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) research scientist Noor Johnson, along with colleagues from the University of Arizona and the Indigenous Food Knowledges Network (IFKN), aims to find out. Johnson is a co-principal investigator on a new National Science Foundation (NSF) funded project, entitled “Impact of COVID-19 on Food Access in Indigenous Communities in the Arctic and US Southwest: A Comparative Landscape Analysis,” that focuses on how COVID-19 has affected food security and sovereignty in these two regions.

The St. Patrick Bay ice caps on the Hazen Plateau of northeastern Ellesmere Island in Nunavut, Canada, have disappeared, according to NASA satellite imagery. National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) scientists and colleagues predicted via a 2017 paper in The Cryosphere that the ice caps would melt out completely within the next five years, and recent images from NASA’s Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) have confirmed that this prediction was accurate.