Steering the ship from her perch 93 feet above the Arctic waterline, U.S. Coast Guard Ensign Valerie Hines guides the vessel through ice cover laid out like a vast white puzzle starting to tear apart.

With warming climate, summer sea ice in the Arctic has been shrinking fast, and now consistently spans less than half the area it did in the early 1980s. This raises the question: It this keeps up, in the future will year-round sea ice—and the creatures who need it to survive—persist anywhere?

The Arctic sea ice has suffered devastating loss and has shrunk to its second lowest on record. Melting sea ice is just one of many signs of a warming climate in the North. Emanuela Campanella explains how climate change is rapidly transforming the Arctic Circle. – Sep 22, 2020

Changes in the northern Alaskan Arctic ocean environment have reached a point at which a previously rare phenomenon—widespread blooms of toxic algae—could become more commonplace, potentially threatening a wide range of marine wildlife and the people who rely on local marine resources for food.