Antarctica & Arctic

"Alexander Deyev can still taste the smoke from last year’s wildfires that blanketed the towns near his home in southeastern Siberia, and he is dreading their return."

"At the South Pole, considered the coldest point on Earth, temperatures are rising fast. So fast, in fact, that Kyle Clem and other climate researchers began to worry and wonder whether human-driven climate change was playing a bigger role than expected in Antarctica."

"A Siberian town with the world’s widest temperature range has recorded a new high amid a heat wave that is contributing to severe forest fires."

"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."