In a report this week, a team of Canadian and U.S. scientists warned that hungry polar bears are increasingly turning to garbage dumps to fill their stomachs as their icy habitat disappears due to climate change.

Following another year of stark climate impacts in the Arctic, scientists warned Tuesday of a new scourge hitting the region: marine trash. With the region warming twice as fast as the rest of the world, sea ice that has long blanketed the Arctic Ocean is disappearing, opening new routes to shipping.

Wally, the walrus who has found fame during his travels round Europe, has been spotted in Iceland more than 900 kilometers from his last known location, He was previously seen 22 days ago in West Cork, Ireland, sparking concerns for his safety.

Over the past years, ice conditions in late October and early November have allowed extensive shipping along the vast Russian Arctic coast. This year, however, large parts of the remote Arctic waters were already covered by sea ice by late October.

A decades-long decline in salmon in the Yukon River has reached a crisis this year, forcing harvest closures and prompting emergency shipments of salmon from other regions of Alaska to river residents who are otherwise facing food shortages.

Nunavut is being hit with lightning from top to bottom because a “pretty significant heat wave” created the right conditions for a phenomenon that’s ordinarily uncommon in the North, a meteorologist with Environment and Climate Change Canada says. Since Saturday, there have been reports of lightning strikes as far north as 79 degrees latitude.

The melt season for Arctic sea ice is underway after the annual maximum extent was reached late last month. Sea ice extent reached its annual maximum on Feb. 25, 15 days earlier than the 1981-2010 average date and one of the earliest dates for that milestone in the four-decade satellite record.

One of the largest caribou herds in North America has declined by nearly a quarter in the past two years, hitting a population level that justifies new hunting restrictions. The news was delivered last week at the annual meeting of the Western Arctic Caribou Herd Working Group, an advisory organization with representatives of villages dependent

Finland’s worst wildfire in more than half a century scorched the country’s northwest for a fifth day on Friday, tearing through forests left dry by record summer heat.

A microscopic organism has wriggled back to life and reproduced asexually after lying frozen in the vast permafrost lands of northeastern Siberia for 24,000 years. Russian scientists found the tiny, ancient animal called the bdelloid rotifer in soil taken from the Alazeya River basin, in the far north of Russia’s Yakutia region.

Temperature records are becoming the new normal for summers on Svalbard, the Arctic archipelago halfway between mainland Norway and the North Pole. Summer 2022 saw the average even higher, with 7.4 degrees C for June, July and August at the airport a few kilometers west of Longyearbyen, the main settlement on the archipelago.

Every year since 2015, the Bering Sea has melted out earlier than in every year before 2015. If heat is killing animals, scientists have yet to pin down exactly how it is doing so.

The Government of Nunavut is restricting harvest due to what it calls “a recent steep decline in the population” of the herd. That decline has led to a “conservation concern” about the western Nunavut herd’s numbers.

Temperatures surpassed 30 degrees Celsius across northern Scandinavia on Wednesday and many meteorological stations hit new record high temperatures for June. The thermometer in Saltdal, northern Norway, reached 31.6 degrees C. Further inside the Arctic Circle, at 69 degrees north in Skibotn east of Tromsø, the temperature was 31.7 degrees (89 F).

Rare footage shot by a researcher expedition in Norway shows a polar bear hunting and catching a swimming adult reindeer. The video, captured by Mateusz Gruszka, a cook for an expedition of Polish researchers in August 2021 on the Svalbard archipelago, shows the bear catching the reindeer and drowning it before dragging it ashore.

With climate change fueling high temperatures across the Arctic, Greenland lost a massive amount of ice on Wednesday with enough melting to cover the U.S. state of Florida in 2 inches (5.1 centimeters) of water, scientists said. It was the third-biggest ice loss for Greenland in a single day since 1950.

Residents of the Russian Arctic city of Norilsk spent time in and around Lake Dolgoye on Tuesday, as temperatures in the region soared. The lake is used for water discharge from Norilsk‘s Central Heating and Power Plant No. 1, but was used for swimming on July 27 as the temperature in the city reached 30 degrees Celsius (86 F).

Ships sailing through the Arctic region's busiest lane along the Siberian coast made the highest number of trips on record this year as a quicker-than-expected melting of ice enabled more traffic.

A French woman is hospitalized and a polar bear is dead after the bear attacked the woman on the Norwegian Arctic archipelago Svalbard Monday morning. The woman, who was wounded in the arm by the attacking polar bear, was one of 25 people staying at a tent camp in Nordfjorden on the northern shores of Isfjorden.

After learning about catches of pink salmon near Salluit, Quebec wildlife officials are urging any fishers who net the newcomers to report their catch. Two pink salmon were netted in Nunavik during the summer of 2019 in the Ungava Bay region, one near Kangirsuk.