Narwhals are helping scientists map warm water hidden in Greenland’s fjords - The Conversation

Deploying sensors on local marine wildlife provides practical data for understanding polar climate trends. By measuring underwater temperatures across remote fjords, scientists can build more reliable models of future sea-level rise. Gathering continuous environmental readings from living ocean navigators opens an unprecedented window into hidden marine habitats. Researchers worked alongside local hunters near Scoresby Sound to attach small tracking tags to six wild narwhals. These compact instruments recorded position, water temperature, conductivity, and depth whenever the animals surfaced to breathe.

The spacecraft delivered materials and equipment for new research studies to the station.

Mud from a fjord shows an Atlantic air pattern brought wetter, colder spells to southern Greenland, a clue to how its ice may fare. Greenland’s ice is shrinking as the planet warms. But in the island’s southwest, rainfall and snowfall have been influenced by the same North Atlantic air-pressure pattern for at least 5,000 years. When that pattern tipped one way, the region turned wetter and colder. The record comes from mud on the floor of a Greenland fjord, and it suggests snowfall, not only temperature, shaped how the area’s ice grew and shrank. It doesn’t yet show how glaciers there will respond to the warming ahead. Johan Faust, a researcher at MARUM, the Center for Marine Environmental Sciences at the University of Bremen in Germany, led the work with colleagues in Germany, Norway, Denmark and Canada. A seesaw in the airThe pattern is called the North Atlantic Oscillation. It’s the difference in air pressure between a low that sits near Iceland and a high near the Azores, and it’s strongest in winter. When that difference is large, the pattern is in its positive phase. Northwestern Europe and southwestern Greenland both get more rain and snow.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory researcher Isaiah Santistevan led the development of three-dimensional simulations exploring how a nuclear device could deflect or disrupt an asteroid threatening Earth. Credit: Blaise Douros/LLNL Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) researchers are developing three-dimensional simulations to examine how a nuclear device could be used to deflect or potentially disrupt an asteroid threatening Earth.