10 years, last week. That’s when I first came to Barrow. Besides the fact that I was 10 years younger (10 years smarter?), a lot of things were different then — SARS was on our breath, Jean Charest had just come to power in Quebec, the iTunes store had just sold its first song, that […]

[photos from 2006 sea ice field course in Hokkaido, Japan] We are planning a sea ice field course in Barrow, Alaska, from May 8-18. All the relevant information for the course can be found in the syllabus, including costs and prerequisites. To sign up for the class, please send a CV and a 1-page summary […]

I made this movie to visually demonstrate the dramatic decrease in Arctic sea ice happening right now. When I was born, in 1979, the minimum summer sea ice extent in the Arctic was about 17,000 cubic kilometers. In 2012, it was less than 5,000 cubic kilometers. The red points show weekly estimates of sea ice […]

Two new papers from the Circumpolar Flaw Lead (CFL) Systems Study will be published soon in a special issue of Polar Biology. They can be accessed below. Collins RE, Deming JW (2011) Abundant dissolved genetic material in Arctic sea ice Part I: Extracellular DNA. Polar Biology. [doi: view online] [Article PDF] [Supplementary Materials PDF] [References […]

Dr. Mikko Karttunen, from the University of Western Ontario, will be speaking at McMaster tomorrow in the Physics and Astronomy seminar. He worked on a recent paper titled Microscopic Mechanism for Cold Denaturation in which they used computer simulations to determine that the highly ordered structure of water at subzero temperatures caused protein denaturation because […]