This is bound to be challenged by every single environmental group with a stake here, but it's still really not encouraging: New York Times reports that the Department of Interior has granted Shell conditional approval to start drilling oil exploration wells in the Arctic Ocean starting next summer. The proposed drill sites are in the Beaufort Sea just north of the Arctic Wildlife Refuge, and east of Prudhoe Bay and the Trans-Alaska Pipeline....Read the full story on TreeHugger
Apropos of last week's frank (and frankly disturbing) revelation from the head of the US Coast Guard, that they have zero capacity to deal with an oil spill in the Arctic: After submitting Freedom of Information Act requests to the State of Alaska and two Federal agencies, Oceana found out that the most recent public Arctic oil spill clean up tests were done in 2000 and, as the video above shows, were categorically a failure. ...Read the full story on TreeHugger
As the race to stake claims for future oil drilling in the Arctic takes off in anticipation of an ice-free region sooner rather than later, and as oil companies and Congress members continue to push for the US to drill in the Arctic, here are some sobering words from the head of the Coast Guard on how woefully unprepared the US is to deal with an oil spill there (h/t Clim...Read the full story on TreeHugger
Image: purplegothicqueen via flickr
Lakshmi Mittal, Britain's richest man, is pushing to open an opencast iron ore "mega-mine" inside the Arctic Circle that will include a 150-kilometer railway and two new ports that will bring a ship in every 32 hours—up from the current rate of zero to ten ships a year....Read the full story on TreeHugger
photo via greenpeace
After scaling the Cairn oil rig Leiv Eiriksson off the coast of Greenland and enduring a water cannon, Greenpeace International Executive Director Kumi Naidoo was arrested Friday and taken into custody. Kumi's brave action came after repeated calls from Greenpeace for Cairn to produce its oil spill response plan which it has thus far refused to do. Kumi carried with him the names of 50,000 people who have asked Cairn to stop exploratory drilling in the Arctic. ...Read the full story on TreeHugger
Ice road on Great Slave Lake, Northwest Territories, photo: Wikipedia.
A twist on the tale of Arctic development opened up by warming temperatures and melting ice: We know that oil companies are itching to explore in newly ice-free waters and that nations are already staking claims, but a new report in Nature Climate Change says that access to interior regions of northern la...Read the full story on TreeHugger
This is bound to be challenged by every single environmental group with a stake here, but it's still really not encouraging: New York Times reports that the Department of Interior has granted Shell conditional approval to start drilling oil exploration wells in the Arctic Ocean starting next summer. The proposed drill sites are in the Beaufort Sea just north of the Arctic Wildlife Refuge, and east of Prudhoe Bay and the Trans-Alaska Pipeline....Read the full story on TreeHugger
There's no doubt that 
photo: 
photo: 
Image: 
All images by Martin Hartley for Catline Arctic Survey
In the last week there have been some very sobering reports on the 
photo via 
Ice road on Great Slave Lake, Northwest Territories, photo: 
