Large Die-Off of Tufted Puffins in Pribilofs Seems Linked to Warm Conditions. Earlier, it was murres and whales that had been turning up dead in large numbers on Alaska beaches or in Alaska waters. Now it is puffins, bright-beaked birds that are icons of Alaska's marine communities. Since mid-October, residents of St. Paul Island in the Pribilofs have found over 200 dead tufted puffins washed ashore on the Bering Sea beach, along with additional dead horned puffins and murres. The extent of the die-off - 217 dead tufted puffins found as of Nov. 4 - is alarming and appears to be linked to unusual warmth in the region, said University of Washington ecologist Julia Parrish, who has been consulting with St. Paul islanders. Alaska Dispatch News

Nunavummiut Smoking More Than Ever: Report. Nunavummiut bought more than 56 million cigarettes in 2015, says the territory's Chief Medical Officer of Health in a new report. That's up from 54.5 million cigarettes sold in 2014. The 2015-16 annual report on Nunavut's Tobacco Control Act shows that while most Canadian jurisdictions have seen steady declines in smoking rates and tobacco use, Nunavut smoking rates are actually on the rise. Nunatsiaq Online

 

Why Did Greenland's Viking Disappear? In 1721, missionary Hans Egede sailed a ship called The Hope from Norway to Greenland, seeking Norse farmers whom Europeans hadn't heard from in 200 years in order to convert them to Protestantism. He explored iceberg-dotted fjords that gave way to gentle valleys, and silver lakes that shimmered below the massive ice cap. But when he asked the Inuit hunters he met about the Norse, they showed him crumbling stone church walls: the only remnants of 500 years of occupation. "What has been the fate of so many human beings, so long cut off from all intercourse with the more civilized world?" Egede wrote in an account of the journey. "Were they destroyed by an invasion of the natives ... [or] perished by the inclemency of the climate, and the sterility of the soil?" Archaeologists still wonder today. No chapter of Arctic history is more mysterious than the disappearance of these Norse settlements sometime in the 15th century. Theories for the colony's failure have included everything from sinister Basque pirates to the Black Plague. But historians have usually pinned most responsibility on the Norse themselves, arguing that they failed to adapt to a changing climate. Science Mag

 

Russian Science at the Crossroads. As the United States goes to the polls after an unprecedentedly vulgar election campaign, its former cold-war rival is exuding strength and confidence. Just last week, Russia cited its proud history of exploration and science in Antarctica when giving the green light to an international agreement to create a vast marine reserve in the Ross Sea. Even so, Vladimir Putin's chauvinistic approach to politics has a certain appeal to some - at home and abroad. The Russian leader's perplexing popularity in some circles detracts from his enduring failure to modernize his country's government, society and economy. Nature 

 

China's Plan for The Arctic-and a Shipping Center to Rival Singapore. Washed by the shallow waters of the Tumen River that divides Russia and North Korea, China's Hunchun has few tourist attractions other than a coin-operated set of binoculars, on an elevated platform, that lets the occasional visitor survey the three neighbors' only junction. But if business expands along Arctic shipping routes linking the Atlantic and Pacific, this obscure city of little more than 200,000 could become "an international shipping center equal to Singapore", Xinhua, China's state-run news agency, claimed last year. China, having styled itself as a "near-Arctic nation", is jockeying to play a greater role in the contested High North. Beijing attained permanent observer status to the intergovernmental Arctic Council in 2013, but experts say its ambitions are beyond those of a passive onlooker. South China Morning Post

 

Arctic Climate Changing Three Times Faster Than Average Global Levels. Addressing an international symposium, scientist Luca Belelli Marchesini from Russia's Far Eastern Federal University presented data showing that the Arctic climate is changing three to four times faster than average global levels, according to the university's website. Yakutsk hosted the ninth international symposium on the carbon, water and energy balance and the climate of boreal and Arctic regions, with a focus on eastern Eurasia. During the event, Marchesini presented data on carbon dioxide emissions in the Arctic zone. The Arctic

 

Researchers Find Traces of Nuclear Tests in the Arctic Ocean. Russian oceanographers who conducted research off the western coast of the Novaya Zemlya Archipelago have established that radionuclides that polluted the island after a series of nuclear tests in the 1960s are gradually washed into the Arctic Ocean, RIA Novosti reported, citing the journal Oceanology. "Analysis of ice samples from the northern ice dome of Novaya Zemlya has not yet revealed any high radioactivity areas. However, our research has produced information about a glacier we did not study before and has identified the layer that is contaminated by radioactive materials," said Alexei Miroshnikov from the Moscow-based Institute of Geology of Ore Deposits, Petrography, Mineralogy and Geochemistry, Russian Academy of Sciences (IGEM RAS). The Arctic 

 

Study Finds Limited Sign of Soil Adaptation to Climate Warming. While scientists and policy experts debate the impacts of global warming, the Earth's soil is releasing roughly nine times more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere than all human activities combined. This huge carbon flux from soil-due to the natural respiration of soil microbes and plant roots-begs one of the central questions in climate change science. As the global climate warms, will soil respiration rates increase, adding even more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere and accelerating climate change? Phys.org