Nunatsiaq News: top environmental stories of 2014

Nunatsiaq News writers spend a lot of time writing about the animals, plants, rocks, flowers, lakes, oceans, ice and weather that define our northern homelands.

Some of those stories generate dozens of comments and foster fierce debates between readers over the validity of research, how it’s conducted, whether it’s relevant and what it means to northern communities.

We compiled our most read environmental stories for 2014, based on your online readership, and discovered the most popular topics focused on Arctic mermaids and other new sea creatures, methane, climate change’s impact on fish and polar bears and heavy sea ice.

Here are the most read environmental stories from last year:

• Even mermaids? Scientists seek new Arctic marine life: A fake documentary entitled Mermaids: The New Evidence on the American television cable show Animal Planet showed a team of researchers in a submersible descending into the dark ocean depths off the northeast coast of Greenland….

Flecks of matter float eerily in front of the craft’s headlights and there is a spooky high-pitched howling sound. Suddenly, a ghoulish greenish creature reaches a webbed hand out from the dark and smacks the ship. It is the half-human, half-fish mythological being known as a mermaid.

The fake doc shows researchers surveying an area that was to be developed for oil — but the mermaid’s discovery halts the drilling plans. A message at the end of the show reveals this incident never actually happened.

Here’s the real scoop — among other recent findings. Fisheries and Oceans Canada recently conducted deep-water fish surveys in the Beaufort Sea, Baffin Bay and Davis Strait.

“One of the species encountered around 1000 metres depth appears to be new to science,” said DFO Arctic ecologist Jim Reist.

The creature, a long eel-like fish that lives on the seafloor might not be a mermaid, but it is something new.

“We have sent the specimens to the world’s expert on this group of fishes at the Danish Natural History Museum in Copenhagen,” Reist said, “and are awaiting a reply.”

• Methane bubbling up from Arctic Ocean floor: Scientists said we may have more to fear than just thawing permafrost and melting sea ice in the Arctic.

Scientists from Sweden’s Stockholm University have discovered that the seabed of the Arctic Ocean is releasing significant amounts of methane, the potent greenhouse gas considered one of the main drivers of climate change.

• Fish species dash poleward: More new kinds of fish are expected to move into the Arctic Ocean as the oceans warm — at a rate of up to 100 kilometres north every 10 years — said a study from the University of British Columbia.

“As fish move to cooler waters, this generates new opportunities for fisheries in the Arctic,” said Miranda Jones, lead author of the research. “On the other hand it means it could disrupt the species that live there now and increase competition for resources.”

What the researchers call “global hotspots of invasions” by new fish and invertebrates such as jellyfish are projected to occur “in higher latitude regions, such as the Arctic Ocean,” said the study published Oct. 10 in the ICES Journal of Marine Science.

Overall, fewer species extinctions are expected in the higher latitudes than at the equator because temperature-sensitive fish will still be able to seek out cooler areas, the study suggests.

• More varied diet for polar bears: polar bears are using their inner brown bear genes to adapt to climate change by changing their diets. That’s what two researchers from the American Museum of Natural History found after studying Hudson Bay polar bear diets.

When there is no sea ice available for seal hunting, polar bears are now more “flexible” in what they eat so they can maintain their energy levels.

“This behavior likely derives from a shared genetic heritage with brown bears, from which polar bears separated about 600,000 years ago,” read a Jan. 21 American Museum of Natural History press release.

Researchers from the museum, Robert Rockwell and Linda Gormezano, found polar bears eat more caribou, snow geese and snow geese eggs because of diminishing sea ice.

• Tough sailing in the icy Northwest Passage: Icebreakers and cruise ships travelling through the Northwest Passage encountered rough sailing conditions in August and September 2014: heavy ice closed the Queen Maud Gulf between the northern coast of the mainland and the southeastern corner of Victoria Island in Nunavut.

While the rate of ice loss during August in the Arctic Ocean overall in 2014 was near average, the NW Passage continued to be clogged with ice, the National Snow and Ice Data Center said. That’s because weather patterns pushed more chunks of polar pack ice into the Northwest Passage than in 2007, 2008, 2010 and 2011. In those years, atmospheric conditions led to “minimal ice inflow from the Arctic Ocean,” the NSIDC said.

As of the end of August 2014, ice-clogged areas in the passage were tracking above the 1981 to 2010 average, said the Colorado-based NSIDC, which bases its reports on satellite information.

• Starvation, reproductive failure ahead for High Arctic polar bears: Arctic conditions may become “critical” for polar bears by the end of the 21st century, suggested a study, which said shifts in ice cover may impact polar bear populations in the High Arctic islands. The study linked climate change and the future health of polar bears, stating that “under business-as-usual climate projections, polar bears may face starvation and reproductive failure across the entire [Canadian Arctic] Archipelago by the year 2100.”

Polar bears are “inextricably linked to Arctic sea ice and are sensitive to sea ice loss,” says the study, called “Projected Polar Bear Sea Ice Habitat in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago,” written by Stephen Hamilton of the University of Alberta and his colleagues and published in November in the open-access journal Plos One.

“We predict that nearly one-tenth of the world’s polar bear habitat, as much as one-quarter of their global population, may undergo significant habitat loss under business-as-usual climate projections,” Hamilton said in a news release about the study.