Arctic Warming Supported by Array of Scientific Indicators. At an annual gathering of more than 20,000 Earth and space scientists, press conferences offered by the organizers feature scientists discussing everything from Mars rovers whiffing methane to Christmas lights visible from space. One press conference that has for a few years had a recurring slot at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union is the state of changes in the Far North. Here are some highlights from that and a few of the thousands of science bites offered at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union. Alaska Dispatch News

Drifting Pole Nudges Fairbanks Closer to Magnetic North. It might be time for Alaskans to start turning the compass a bit less to account for planet Earth's wandering magnetic poles. A five-year update to a magnetic model released Monday shows the north magnetic pole is continuing its inconsistent drift westward toward Siberia. The model, calculated by the U.S. and British governments, is used for technology such as military fighter jets and consumer smartphones. For Fairbanks, the World Magnetic Model puts the declination, the difference between magnetic and geographic north, at 18.8 degrees east. Fairbanks Daily News-Miner

ANSEP Named Top STEM Program for Minority Students. The Alaska Native Science and Engineering Program was named the most exceptional program in STEM education and workforce development by the United States Department of Energy's Minorities in Energy Initiative. If you aren't aware of STEM education yet, it stands for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics, and you should get to know it because it's one of the biggest trends in education. Fairbanks Daily News-Miner

New Discovery in Beaufort Sea is a Very Old Clam. The rapidly thawing Arctic Ocean may be a new frontier but some of the latest news from there concerns a clam that is believed to date back more than a million years. Some bivalves retrieved from the ocean depths during a 2010 mapping mission in the Beaufort Sea turn out to be members of a species previously unknown to science, explains a study published Dec. 10 in the journal ZooKeys. Alaska Dispatch News

Reindeer Population are diminishing Due to Inbreeding and Poaching. Reindeer populations are in trouble around the world, and in China, the iconic animals are on the decline largely because of inbreeding, according to new research. Some folklorists say Christmas tales of flying reindeer may have originated as a hallucination, with one theory claiming the inspiration for Santa Claus came from shamans who would give out bags of hallucinatory mushrooms in late December in the Siberian and Arctic regions. But, nonflying reindeer are very real and an important part of northern ecosystems. Washington Post

'Arctic Fiber' Project Delayed in 2016. The backers of an ambitious project to build a fiber optic cable between England and Japan beneath Arctic waters-and in the process bring high-speed internet to remote corners of western Alaska-say undertaking has seen delays that will push the arrival of service back until at least 2016. Canadian telecommunications company Arctic Fibre is running the undersea cable, while Anchorage-based Quintillion Networks is the "middle mile" provider creating several spur lines that would shoot off the main fiber backbone and connect the ultrafast cable to telecom companies in Nome, Kotzebue, and other communities along the Bering Strait coast and the North Slope. Colloquially referred to as the "Arctic fiber" project, it promises to bring "gigabit internet" to the most remote parts of western Alaska. Quintillion expects speeds of 100 gigabits per second from the fiber line; current consumer broadband in Nome and Barrow reach speeds up to 6 megabits per second, equal to .006 gigabits per second. KTOO

Seals May Use 'Magnetic Sense' to Find Breathing Holes. So it is with the seals of Antarctica, whom scientists at the U.S. Antarctic Program have been studying for the past few months in an effort to figure out how they find those rare lifelines, and how they do it so well. And, after months of monitoring data from cameras strapped to several Weddell seals (Yes, really), it looks like they've hit upon the answer: A sort of internal 'GPS', linked to the Earth's magnetic field. You can check out the full story in the video above, from the National Science Foundation. The Weather Network

Sea Ice Outlook: Post-Season Report. The sea ice monthly extent for September 2014 was 5.28 million square kilometers, based on National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) estimates using the NASA Team sea ice algorithm, which is 100,000 square kilometers below the value for last year, making it the 6th lowest extent on record.Based on 24 pan-Arctic contributions submitted in August, the median Outlook value for September was 5.0 million square kilometers with quartiles of 4.6 and 5.2 million square kilometers. The median value was higher than both the June and July submissions by 0.3 and 0.2 million square kilometers, respectively, and within 0.3 million square kilometers from the observed value. Sea Ice Prediction Network