The northernmost town in the world, Ny-Ålesund, has for more than 30 years hosted the UK’s Arctic Research Station – the nation’s only permanent infrastructure at the Earth’s northern pole.
Located on the Norwegian island of Svalbard – one of the most rapidly warming regions on Earth – the station acts as a base for UK scientists studying the Arctic’s ice, ecosystems and atmosphere.
On 7 February, Carbon Brief was invited to the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), the UK’s national polar research institute in Cambridge, to hear more about what life is like for UK scientists living in the Arctic Circle.
BAS’s Arctic Day also offered a chance to hear about how researchers are working to understand the complex impacts of climate change on the land’s most northern edge.
UK Arctic base
Formerly a mining town, Ny-Ålesund now hosts Arctic research stations for a range of countries including China, France, Germany, India, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway and the UK.
It is accessible via a flight on a 14-seater plane that leaves four times a week from Longyearbyen, the largest town in Svalbard.
Speaking at BAS’s Arctic Day, the institute’s Arctic operations manager Iain Rudkin explained that the town is famous for being the starting point for a number of “crazy” Arctic expeditions.
This includes the expeditions of Roald Amundsen, the Norwegian explorer who was the first man to successfully navigate the treacherous Northwest Passage through the Arctic to North America by boat in 1905.
The UK’s Arctic Research Station was built in 1991. It consists of seven bedrooms, three laboratories, a sitting room, an office and storage space. The station can be explored room by room using this 3D virtual tour tool.
According to station lab manager Guy Hillyard, the labs consist of a general space, a microscopic lab and a wet lab suitable for processing dirty soils and sediments.
The station also has an annex for drying mosses and soils, freezers at temperatures from -18 to -25C for storing ice cores and separate freezers for storing frozen sediment, he added.
Until recently, Ny-Ålesund was a town of “radio silence”, meaning there was no wifi, bluetooth or other kinds of internet access. However, last year, a decision was made to install a 4G mast.
Although many living at Ny-Ålesund appreciated the radio silence, the decision was made to make it easier for people out in the field to call for help if in danger and to allow scientists to use scientific equipment that communicates via the internet, Rudkin said.
Algae, AI and invisible ecosystems
BAS’s Arctic Day saw a number of UK-based scientists briefly explain the purposes of their research at Ny-Ålesund in the past and coming few months.
Dr Jaz Millar, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bristol, travelled to Ny-Ålesund in July 2023 as part of their research into how climate change could be affecting algal blooms on glaciers, which are vast rivers of frozen ice.
The algae that Millar studies is dark purple, meaning it lowers the “albedo” on the surface of glaciers. Albedo is a term for describing the proportion of sunlight that is reflected away from a surface, with bright white having a high albedo and dark colours having a low albedo.
When the albedo on the glacier’s surface is lowered, it absorbs more sunlight. This causes it to melt faster.
It is possible that presence of meltwater induces the growth of more algae – potentially representing a self-reinforcing “worrying positive feedback loop”, Millar explained.
Around Ny-Ålesund, Millar’s team visited three glaciers. They studied algal growth with a range of techniques, including bringing microscopes directly into their field sites and taking ice samples.
Millar’s research has not yet been published, but the results suggest that the relationship between glacier melt and algal bloom growth may be more complex than just a linear positive feedback loop.
Elsewhere, Prof Kate Hendry, a chemical oceanographer at BAS, explained more about her research into how the melting of glaciers could be altering the flow of key nutrients into coastal waters – eventually impacting marine ecosystems.
She explained that glacier meltwater typically contains nutrients that are needed by diatoms – single-cell algae that act as food for tiny marine creatures called zooplankton – which in turn support a wide range of fish, bird and mammal species, including whales. These nutrients include iron nitrate and silicic acid.
As glaciers melt at an increasingly rapid rate because of climate change, this may impact the growth of diatoms – in turn affecting species higher up the food chain, she said.
To study this, Hendry’s team visited Ny-Ålesund in 2023 to collect more than 1,000 samples from glaciers, the ocean and sediments. Her team will return this year to look further at how the availability of iron and silicon in fjord environments could be affected by climate change.
At the sidelines of the presentations, Carbon Brief spoke to Martin Rogers, a machine-learning scientist at BAS, about his research using AI to map changes to Arctic sea ice in higher resolution than is currently available.
The AI tool can search through different types of satellite imagery, offering scientists the highest-resolution image available when considering factors such as cloud cover, which can obscure views of the sea ice, he explained.
In the future, this tool could be used to help scientists understand in greater detail the extent to which sea ice is declining because of climate change, he added:
“The big question is about the decline in sea ice extent. With this product, you can get the sea ice extent in high fidelity. Then you’ve got more precise information about how the sea ice extent is changing between years.”
Finally, the conference heard from Laura Molares Moncayo, a PhD student at the Natural History Museum and Queen Mary University of London.
Her research is centred around the question of whether the Arctic’s atmosphere could be supporting an ecosystem that is invisible to the human eye.
For decades, researchers assumed that glaciers were devoid of complex lifeforms, she explained. However, research has revealed that they actually support a vast array of microorganisms, which are well adapted for harsh, frozen environments.
How did these microorganisms find their way into glaciers?
Glaciers grow by receiving rain and snow from the atmosphere. In fact, glaciers could be considered a “condensed version of the atmosphere”, Molares Moncayo explained.
It is possible, she continued, that the microorganisms found in glaciers may have fallen from the atmosphere. Such microorganisms would, in theory, already possess the adaptations required to survive the tough conditions of the Arctic air.
In a week’s time, she will travel to Ny-Ålesund to try to establish whether the Arctic atmosphere is home to an invisible ecosystem of microorganisms.
To do this, she will use a range of equipment, including dry air samplers, which collect any solid particles present in air into a filter.
She will then use DNA sequencing techniques to identify which microorganisms are present in her air samples. She will also study the microorganisms’ functional genes, which will offer clues into whether the microorganisms are interacting with each other when still in the air.
The post Ny-Ålesund: How UK scientists are studying climate change in the Arctic appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Ny-Ålesund: How UK scientists are studying climate change in the Arctic
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Three countries have been named by the Paris Agreement’s compliance committee for failing to submit a nationally determined contribution (NDC) and repeatedly snubbing offers of help with their climate plans.
After months of internal debate over whether to identify serial non-responders, the Paris Agreement’s Implementation and Compliance Committee (PAICC) named the three countries which have failed to engage with it over their NDCs on Friday.
It named Democratic Republic of Congo, Senegal and North Korea in a footnote of its annual report, adding that it decided to name them “with a view to facilitating engagement”, adding that representatives of the three nations had been invited to its meeting in early 2027 “with the purpose of identifying any challenges and constraints”.
“The Committee noted the importance of Parties engaging with the Committee in a timely manner, while noting that some delays may be due to the national capabilities and circumstances of the Parties”, the report said.
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Paris Agreement committee snubbed over missing NDC climate plans
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In July, PAICC said 12 countries had ignored its repeated attempts to discuss why they had not published an NDC as required every five years under the 2015 Paris accord.
Members of the committee had been divided over whether to name them, but at a September meeting decided to do so in their annual report to the annual climate COP summit.
By the time the report was published on Friday, only Congo, Senegal and North Korea “had not communicated an NDC or submitted a [Biennial Transparency Report] and had not yet responded to any of the Committee’s notifications, despite several reminders issued by the Committee in this regard”.
Rainforest and renewable energy ambitions
The silence from Congo and Senegal is notable because the former is home to much of the Congo Basin rainforest while the latter has sought billions of dollars in climate finance to support its renewable energy ambitions.
After Brazil, Congo has more rainforest than any country in the world. This forest, and the country’s peatlands, absorb huge amounts of greenhouse gas but are fast being lost to expanding farmland, charcoal production, logging and mining.
Senegal signed a Just Energy Transition Partnership with Canada and wealthy European nations in 2023, to help it meet its renewable energy targets under the-then government of Macky Sall. It was chair of the Least Developed Countries group between January 2022 and December 2023.
Tejas Rao, who is researching the PAICC as part of a doctoral thesis at Cambridge University, said the governments of the three countries should engage with the committee.
“Engagement costs these governments very little and the committee has shown it will listen,” he said.
“Silence leaves the committee with no basis to help, and it leaves the [governments] exposed to the narrative that they are simply disengaged,” he told Climate Home News.
Paris Agreement requirement
The 2015 Paris Agreement requires all parties to publish an NDC every five years outlining their emissions reduction targets, with each plan meant to be more ambitious than the country’s last NDC.
The latest set – the third round of plans, with new targets for 2035 – was due in February 2025. While most countries missed this deadline, all but around 30 – mostly small emitters but including Egypt, Vietnam and Argentina – have now submitted them.
Over the year, the PAICC – which is made up of government climate officials from developed and developing countries – has been communicating with governments that have not submitted NDCs and trying to overcome barriers to them doing so.
Some nations have cited exceptional circumstances as the reason for not submitting an NDC, a process that requires a significant amount of work in tracking emissions and consulting on how to curb them across the economy. For example, a letter from a Sudanese official to the PAICC, seen by Climate Home News, said that the country’s civil war had led to the suspension of its NDC preparation.
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The US and Iran are not signed up to the Paris Agreement and so do not have active NDCs, nor does Taiwan, which is not a UN member state.
Rao said that because the PAICC is “facilitative and non-punitive”, naming the countries “is meant to open a door, not close one – the invited consultation is the point”.
“In recent months, governments that explained their constraints, whether capacity, finance or domestic process, have been met with follow-up and support rather than sanction, and the number of silent governments has fallen sharply,” Rao said.
The post Paris Agreement committee names three countries snubbing it over NDCs appeared first on Climate Home News.
Paris Agreement committee names three countries snubbing it over NDCs