In Climate Change and the New Polar Aesthetics, Lisa E. Bloom considers the ways artists, filmmakers, and activists engaged with the Arctic and Antarctic to represent our current environmental crises and reconstruct public understandings of them. Bloom engages feminist, Black, Indigenous, and non-Western perspectives to address the exigencies of the experience of the Anthropocene and its attendant ecosystem failures, rising sea levels, and climate-led migrations. As opposed to mainstream media depictions of climate change that feature apocalyptic spectacles of distant melting ice and desperate polar bears, artists such as Katja Aglert, Subhankar Banerjee, Joyce Campbell, Judit Hersko, Roni Horn, Isaac Julien, Zacharias Kunuk, Connie Samaras, and activist art collectives take a more complex poetic and political approach. In their films and visual and conceptual art, these artists link climate change to its social roots in colonialism and capitalism while challenging the suppression of information about environmental destruction and critiquing Western art institutions for their complicity. Bloom’s examination and contextualization of new polar aesthetics makes environmental degradation more legible while demonstrating that our own political agency is central to imagining and constructing a better world.

The polar regions are experiencing rapid changes in climate. These changes are causing observable ecological impacts of various types and degrees of severity at all ecosystem levels, including society. Even larger changes and more significant impacts are anticipated. As species respond to changing environments over time, their interactions with the physical world and other organisms can also change. This chain of interactions can trigger cascades of impacts throughout entire ecosystems. Evaluating the interrelated physical, chemical, biological, and societal components of polar ecosystems is essential to understanding their vulnerability and resilience to climate forcing. The Polar Research Board (PRB) organized a workshop to address these issues. Experts gathered from a variety of disciplines with knowledge of both the Arctic and Antarctic regions. Participants were challenged to consider what is currently known about climate change and polar ecosystems and to identify the next big questions in the field. A set of interdisciplinary "frontier questions" emerged from the workshop discussions as important topics to be addressed in the coming decades. To begin to address these questions, workshop participants discussed the need for holistic, interdisciplinary systems approach to understanding polar ecosystem responses to climate change. As an outcome of the workshop, participants brainstormed methods and technologies that are crucial to advance the understanding of polar ecosystems and to promote the next generation of polar research. These include new and emerging technologies, sustained long-term observations, data synthesis and management, and data dissemination and outreach.

The polar regions are the 'canary in the coal mine' of climate change: they are likely to be hit the hardest and fastest. This comprehensive textbook provides an accessible introduction to the scientific study of polar environments against a backdrop of climate change and the wider global environment. The book assembles diverse information on polar environmental characteristics in terrestrial and oceanic domains, and describes the ongoing changes in climate, the oceans, and components of the cryosphere. Recent significant changes in the polar region caused by global warming are explored: shrinking Arctic sea ice, thawing permafrost, accelerating loss of mass from glaciers and ice sheets, and rising ocean temperatures. These rapidly changing conditions are discussed in the context of the paleoclimatic history of the polar regions from the Eocene to the Anthropocene. Future projections for these regions during the twenty-first century are discussed. The text is illustrated with many color figures and tables, and includes further reading lists, review questions for each chapter, and a glossary.

'In this book, Bloom takes what might seem a very localized subject and shows how it opens up to all the central questions today in cultural studies around gender, nationhood, the politics of imperialism, race, male homosocial behavior, and the sociality of science. Gender on Ice has an eloquence and elegance that positively refreshing and the prose is stylish, engaging, and direct.' -Dana Polan, University of Pittsburgh

The polar regions have experienced some remarkable environmental changes in recent decades, such as the Antarctic ozone hole, the loss of large amounts of sea ice from the Arctic Ocean and major warming on the Antarctic Peninsula. The polar regions are also predicted to warm more than any other region on Earth over the next century if greenhouse gas concentrations continue to rise. Yet trying to separate natural climate variability from anthropogenic factors still presents many problems. This book presents a thorough review of how the polar climates have changed over the last million years and sets recent changes within a long term perspective. The approach taken is highly cross-disciplinary and the close links between the atmosphere, ocean and ice at high latitudes are stressed. The volume will be invaluable for researchers and advanced students in polar science, climatology, global change, meteorology, oceanography and glaciology.

Combining multidisciplinary perspectives and new research, this volume goes beyond broad discussions of the impacts of climate change and reflects on the current and historical mediations and narratives that are part of creating this new social and scientific reality.

This book relays the factual details of the 2014 polar vortex and climate change through three different perspectives. The narrative provides multiple accounts of the event, and readers learn details through the point of view of a college student, New Yorker, and coal miner. The text offers opportunities to compare and contrast various perspectives while gathering and analyzing information about a modern event. Content focuses on point-of-view and encourages readers to understand how background and experience can lead to differing views.