* Astronomy

The Inuit sitting on billions of barrels of oil

After a decade of legal wrangling and spending $4.5bn (£2.8bn), this year Shell Oil was given permission to begin exploratory drilling off the coast of Alaska. But many in the local Inuit community are concerned it could have a devastating impact on one of their main sources of food - the bowhead whale.
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Less ice in the Arctic Ocean 6000-7000 years ago

Recent mapping of a number of raised beach ridges on the north coast of Greenland suggests that the ice cover in the Arctic Ocean was greatly reduced some 6000-7000 years ago. The Arctic Ocean may have been periodically ice free.

"The climate in the northern regions has never been milder since the last Ice Age than it was about 6000-7000 years ago. We still don't know whether the Arctic Ocean was completely ice free, but there was more open water in the area north of Greenland than there is today" - Astrid Lyså, a geologist and researcher at the Geological Survey of Norway (NGU).

Together with her NGU colleague, Eiliv Larsen, she has worked on the north coast of Greenland with a group of scientists from the University of Copenhagen, mapping sea-level changes and studying a number of shore features. She has also collected samples of driftwood that originated from Siberia or Alaska and had these dated, and has collected shells and microfossils from shore sediments.
Pack-ice ridges which form when drift ice is pressed onto the seashore piling up shore sediments that lie in its path, have a completely different character. They are generally shorter, narrower and more irregular in shape.
The mapping at 82 degrees North took place in summer 2007 as part of the LongTerm project, a sub-project of the major International Polar Year project, SciencePub. The scientists also studied ruined settlements dating from the first Inuit immigration to these desolate coasts.
The first people from Alaska and Canada, called the Independence I Culture, travelled north-east as far as they could go on land as long ago as 4000-4500 years ago. The scientists have found out that drift ice had formed on the sea again in this period, which was essential for the Inuit in connection with their hunting. No beach ridges have been formed since then.

Source Geological Survey of Norway

A 3,000-year-old clump of human hair found frozen in Greenland may have solved a scientific mystery: Where did all the ancient Eskimos come from?

The ancient clump of hair looks like something you'd sweep off a barbershop floor.

"It's kind of brown, got a bit of dirt in it, a bit of twigs, but ... it looks  remarkably good condition" - biologist Thomas Gilbert of the University of Copenhagen.

University of Copenhagen researchers had spent months in Greenland trying to find human remains, with no success. They then learned of this hair sample, which was discovered in the 1980s in Disko Bay, in western Greenland, and was being kept in a museum collection.
And the hair yielded something extremely rare the DNA of some of the earliest humans to live in the Arctic. By studying that DNA, researchers say they've been able to answer a longstanding question: Are modern inuit descended from ancient Native Americans, or did they come from somewhere else?
The answer, according to a new study published in the current issue of the journal Science, is somewhere else probably eastern Asia.

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