Arctic Agenda Archives

One of the drill ships that Royal Dutch Shell plans to use in a controversial Arctic drilling programme slipped off its moorings and drifted to the edge of shore in Alaska's Aleutian islands, a US Coast Guard representative said.

Chinese President Hu Jintao's three-day visit to Denmark may ostensibly have been about signing billions worth of business deals, but a stake in Greenland's huge mineral wealth may have been the elephant in the room.

In Svalbard politicians and scientists talk of global warming and a low carbon economy. Outside, the drilling rigs are moving in.

This year's frenzy of oil and gas exploration in newly accessible Arctic waters could be a harbinger of even starker changes to come.

The Arctic is becoming a new geopolitical centre, and the EU and the rest of the world need to update their "mental maps", Norwegian Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Støre said.

A huge pool of fresh water in the Arctic Ocean is expanding and could lower Europe’s temperature by causing a mild ocean current to slow down, British scientists say.

Norway’s Statoil has made a second big oil discovery in the Barents Sea in less than a year and predicted more discoveries to come in the region.

Europe's seas are changing at an unprecedented rate as ice sheets melt, temperatures rise and marine life migrates due to climate change, a report by the Climate Change and European Marine Ecosystem Research (CLAMER) project has warned.

ExxonMobil and Rosneft signed an agreement yesterday (30 August) to extract oil and gas from the Russian Arctic, in the most significant US-Russia corporate deal since President Barack Obama began a push to improve bilateral ties.

British oil company BP has launched a legal case in a Stockholm arbitration court against Renova, one of the shareholders in its Anglo-Russian TNK-BP joint venture, a source at Renova said.

Negotiations between British Petroleum and Rosneft, Russia's leading oil company, to develop three massive offshore exploration blocks in the Arctic have failed, according to media reports yesterday (17 May).

The seventh annual Arctic Council has opened in Greenland today (11 May) as secret US embassy cables released by WikiLeaks show that nations are racing to carve up the region’s oil, gas and mineral resources, as its ice retreats because of global warming.

An exceptionally large area of depleted ozone has formed over the North Pole, and scientists warn that it could settle over Scandinavia and Eastern Europe on 30-31 March.

Scientists at an Arctic tipping point conference in Norway are trying to agree terms for an early warning system that could monitor sudden climate shifts, such as the much-feared melting of glaciers.

BP agreed on 14 January to form a joint venture with Rosneft to develop three massive offshore exploration blocks that Rosneft owns in the Arctic territory of Russia. US lawmakers, the UK's opposition Labour party and environmentalists blasted the deal, which has been dubbed 'Bolshoi Petroleum'.

Russia and Norway agreed on Tuesday (2 November) to ease frontier controls and said they hoped for cooperation on oil and gas exploration after a deal earlier this year ended a four-decade dispute over Arctic seas.