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The erosion of the shoreline of Alaska’s Sarichef Island from rising sea levels has prompted the residents of the island’s village of Shishmaref to decide to relocate, before their traditional island home is overcome by the sea.

Home to 650 Inupiat Inuit, Sarichef Island lies in the Chukchi Sea, just north of the Bering Strait, and like the rest of Alaska, is warming twice as fast as the contiguous states. Shishmaref is one of 31 Alaskan villages that are in danger from erosion and flooding, according to the US Government Accountability Office.
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On August 1, China launched their Quantum Experiments at Space Scale (QUESS) satellite from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert. This satellite, a joint Austrian-Chinese collaboration, is intended to facilitate long-distance experiments in quantum optics, to allow the development of secure quantum-encryption communications and quantum information teleportation technology. On August 19, Beijing’s control center successfully received 202 megabytes of data from the satellite, nicknamed Micius after the 5th century Chinese scholar, secured using quantum encryption keys.
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In 1960, the United States Army launched a program called "Project Iceworm", a plan to build launch sites for nuclear missiles under the northern Greenland ice sheet, to provide the missiles with closer access to the Soviet Union. To test the feasibility of this concept, the Army established a base called Camp Century, a functioning military site consisting of tunnels and chambers carved directly into the ice. However, the site’s engineers soon found that the glacier that the base was built into isn’t a stable mass of ice, but instead flows at a slow rate, deforming the base’s tunnels. This resulted in Camp Century’s abandonment in 1966.
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A new study on the lifespan of the Greenland shark has established that this fish may be the longest-lived vertebrate on Earth. While marine biologists have long suspected that this species of shark had a long lifespan — one individual, caught twice, with each catch more than a decade apart, had shown growth of less than a centimeter per year — researchers had no definitive way of dating individual specimens, as dating fish involves counting the layers in their bones. Sharks, on the other hand, have cartilage skeletons that don’t exhibit this layering, making dating them difficult.
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