An important message for the Arctic Deeply community.

Construction is wrapping up on the Illusuak Cultural Centre, a striking wooden structure being built on the shores of the North Atlantic in Nain, Canada, to celebrate the region’s Inuit heritage.

Arctic cruise passengers are being enlisted to help analyze logbooks kept by whalers nearly two centuries ago in an effort to better understand how sea ice in the region has shrunk.

Nunavut is pushing for federal cash to help advance a mining project that would bring badly needed jobs to the territory’s northwest. But critics – including territorial government biologists – worry about the impact on a nearby barren-ground caribou herd.

The Canadian High Arctic Research Station in Cambridge Bay will serve as a base for scientists studying everything from the region’s changing cryosphere to how to best deploy renewable energy projects in northern communities.

How much climate change is natural? How much is man-made?

Professor Gareth Phoenix has been visiting Abisko, in the Arctic circle of Sweden, for years. He's been there in the depths of winter when the snow is several feet deep, and in the height of summer when mosquitoes are buzzing around every person (and reindeer) in sight. If there's one thing he's learnt from his years of research in the Arctic circle, it's to be prepared for extremes.

Governments are meeting in the Principality of Monaco from Friday to approve a new U.N. report that outlines the impacts and risks to nature and humans of dramatically changing oceans, polar regions and glaciers. The report will underscore the crisis we face, with already seen climate impacts increasing in scale, frequency and intensity.

The sea ice extent in the Arctic is nearing its annual minimum at the end of the melt season in September. Only circa 3.9 million square kilometres of the Arctic Ocean are covered by sea ice anymore, according to researchers from the Alfred Wegener Institute and the University of Bremen. This is only the second time that the annual minimum has dropped below four million square kilometres since satellite measurements began in 1979.

An international collaboration of scientists in Iceland, Denmark and the Netherlands has for the first time used ancient DNA analyses and C14-dating to demonstrate the past existence of a unique population of Icelandic walrus that went extinct shortly after Norse settlement some 1100 years ago. Walrus hunting and ivory trade was probably the principal cause of extinction, being one of the earliest examples of commercially driven overexploitation of marine resources.