Compared to the record-setting low years of 2007 and 2008, the Arctic Sea ice has made a slight recovery in 2009, according to the University of Colorado at Boulder’s National Snow and Ice Data Center. Despite this positive change, the minimum sea ice extent in 2009 was the third lowest since satellite record-keeping started in 1979.

“It’s nice to see a little recovery over the past couple of years, but there’s no reason to think that we’re headed back to conditions seen in the 1970s,” said NSIDC Director Mark Serreze, also a professor in CU-Boulder’s geography department. “We still expect to see ice-free summers sometime in the next few decades.”

The standard measurement for climate studies is the average ice extent during September. This September, the average Arctic Sea ice extent was 5.36 million square kilometres, which is 1.06 million square kilometres more than September 2007 and 690,000 square kilometres more than September 2008.

According to Mike Steele, Senior Oceanographer at the University of Washington, the decrease in ice loss is probably due to cloudy skies during late summer. Sea surface temperatures in the Arctic were higher than normal this season, but slightly lower than in 2007 and 2008 – most likely due to the presence of clouds this year. Atmospheric patterns in August and September also helped spreading the ice pack over a larger area.

Arctic sea ice follows an annual cycle of melting during the warm season and refreezing in the winter, and the extent of Arctic sea ice has always varied due to changing atmospheric conditions. During the past 30 years, there has however been a dramatic overall decline in Arctic sea ice extent.

Russia is planning to exploit Arctic oil and gas reserves with the aid of a fleet of floating and submersible nuclear power stations. A prototype is currently being constructed at the SevMash shipyard in Severodvinsk and is scheduled to be ready for use in 2010. Four similar ones are also planned to be built in the near future, according to an agreement between the northern Siberian republic Yakutiya and Rosatom, the Russian state nuclear corporation.

Each 70-megawatt plant will consist of two reactors placed on giant steel platforms. The floating power stations will be self-propelled and store both fuel and waste. The generated power will be used by Gazprom to power drills needed to exploit oil and gas fields in the world in the Barents and Kara seas. The oil- and natural gas company Gazprom is currently Russia’s largest company and it employs a large number of Russians.

In addition to the power stations, engineers have also developed submarine nuclear-powered drilling rigs powerful enough to drill eight wells at a time.

The new about Russia’s intentions have alarmed environmental watchdog groups around the world who fear the Arctic will become even more polluted if firms try to exploit these oil and gas reserves.

According to Bellona, a leading Scandinavian environmental watchdog group, the risk of nuclear accidents in the Arctic is also high.

“It is highly risky. The risk of a nuclear accident on a floating power plant is increased. The plants’ potential impact on the fragile Arctic environment through emissions of radioactivity and heat remains a major concern. If there is an accident, it would be impossible to handle,” said Bellona spokesman Igor Kudrik.

Russia claims that all radioactive waste will be stored on the platforms, but this country has a long record of polluting the Arctic with radioactive waste and environmentalists fear that Russia will continue this practise. Countries such as Britain have had to pay Russia billions of dollars to decommission around 160 Russian nuclear submarines, and at least 12 nuclear reactors have been dumped despite this. Russia has also dumped 5,000 containers of solid and liquid nuclear waste on the northern coast and on the island of Novaya Zemlya.

According to a new report from the Arctic Council, an intergovernmental forum, and the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme, Russia is also considering building nuclear plants to power settlements in northern and eastern Russia. “The locations that have been discussed include 33 towns in the Russian far north and far east. Such plants could be also used to supply energy for oil and gas extraction,” says the report.

The Census of Marine Life[1] has now documented 7,500 species from the Antarctic and 5,500 species from the Arctic. A majority of the species encountered by the census was previously known by science, but at least a few hundred species are believed to be entirely new discoveries. Researchers did for instance encounter an impressive amount of sea spiders species where the adult spider can grow as big as a human hand.

These new findings may force us to change the way we think about the Polar Regions. “The textbooks have said there is less diversity at the poles than the tropics but we found astonishing richness of marine life in the Antarctic and Arctic oceans,” says Dr. Victoria Wadley[2], a researcher from the Australian Antarctic Division who took part in the Antarctic survey. “We are rewriting the textbooks.“

Dr. Gilly Llewellyn[3], who did not take part in the survey but is the leader of the oceans program for the environmental group WWF-Australia, agrees. “We probably know more about deep space than we do about the deep polar oceans in our own backyard. This critical research is helping reveal the amazing biodiversity of the polar regions.”

The survey was carried out by over 500 researchers from 25 different countries as a part of the International Polar Year which ran in 2007-2008. Thanks to newly developed top-notch technology it is now possible to carry out more efficient exploration of these harsh environments than ever before, and the researchers did for instance examine the Arctic basin down to a depth of 3,000 metres where they encountered tiny, shrimp-like crustaceans. The survey also led to the number of known comb jellies (ctenophores) species to double from five to ten.