Footage has been released showing a gigantic fireball engulfing the port engine of the Australian Antarctic program's resupply vessel, the MPV Everest. The ship faced the emergency on Monday and has continued travelling north using its starboard engine room
Continue reading...Category Archives: Antarctica
Scale of onboard fire revealed as damaged Antarctic ship MPV Everest tries to avoid rough weather
Captain heads for Fremantle at reduced speed after blaze engulfs supply ship’s port engine room and destroys two inflatable boats onboard
Dramatic images have revealed the scale of a fire that erupted on the Antarctic supply ship MPV Everest on Monday while the ship was days away from returning to Australia.
No one was injured but the captain changed course for the closest Australian port at Fremantle, Western Australia, after the fire engulfed the port engine room and destroyed two inflatable rubber boats stored on the deck.
Continue reading...Fire on Australia’s Antarctic resupply vessel leaves expeditioners shaken
Australian Antarctic Division says 109 people on board were uninjured, but the incident was ‘potentially traumatic’ for some
An engine room fire that destroyed two vessels on board Australia’s Antarctic resupply ship has left expeditioners shaken as they begin their journey home.
The vessel, the MPV Everest, was in the middle of the Southern Ocean, four days into a two-week journey, when the ship’s portside engine room caught alight around 2pm on Monday.
Continue reading...Huge iceberg breaks off from shelf in Antarctica – video
Aerial video released on 26 February reveals a huge iceberg has separated from the Brunt Ice Shelf in Antarctica, almost 10 years after scientists first discovered cracks.
The berg has been compared in size to the English county of Bedfordshire, measuring 1,270 sq km, according to the British Antarctic Survey (BAS).
Scientists were expecting the calving of the iceberg to happen, after daily monitoring of the area with GPS instruments and satellite imagery, the BAS's director, Prof Dame Jane Francis, said
Continue reading...Iceberg size of Greater London breaks off Antarctica
The 1,270sq km chunk separated from Brunt Ice Shelf near a British Antarctic Survey station on Friday
An iceberg almost the size of Greater London has split off from Antarctica, near a British Antarctic Survey station.
Related: Researchers rethink life in a cold climate after Antarctic find
Continue reading...Researchers rethink life in a cold climate after Antarctic find
Scientists surprised by marine organisms on boulder on sea floor beneath 900 metres of ice shelf
The accidental discovery of marine organisms on a boulder on the sea floor beneath 900 metres (3,000ft) of Antarctic ice shelf has led scientists to rethink the limits of life on Earth.
Researchers stumbled on the life-bearing rock after sinking a borehole through nearly a kilometre of the Filchner-Ronne ice shelf on the south-eastern Weddell Sea to obtain a sediment core from the seabed.
Continue reading...Wallet lost in Antarctica turns up in California 53 years later
Paul Grisham forgot he lost it until rediscovery during demolition work at McMurdo base
Paul Grisham’s wallet was missing for so long at the bottom of the world he forgot all about it. Fifty-three years later the 91-year-old San Diego man has it back along with mementoes of his 13-month assignment as a US navy meteorologist on Antarctica in the 1960s.
“I was just blown away,” Grisham told the San Diego Union-Tribune after the wallet was returned on Saturday. “There was a long series of people involved who tracked me down and ran me to ground.”
Continue reading...‘A real bad precedent’: Australia criticised for Antarctica airport plan
Multibillion-dollar project is unnecessary and damaging to wildlife, say scientists
Australia is planning to build Antarctica’s biggest infrastructure project: a new airport and runway that would increase the human footprint in the world’s greatest wilderness by an estimated 40%.
The mega-scheme is likely to involve blasting petrel rookeries, disturbing penguin colonies and encasing a stretch of the wilderness in more than 115,000 tonnes of concrete.
Continue reading...China helps evacuate sick Australian from Antarctica in five-day mission
Ships, helicopters and planes traverse thousands of kilometres of icy continent in complex, multinational medical evacuation
Australia and China have collaborated on a mission to medically evacuate an Australian expeditioner from Antarctica with help from the United States.
The operation took five days, used ships, helicopters and planes, and covered thousands of kilometres of the icy continent.
Continue reading...Huge Antarctic iceberg headed towards South Georgia breaks in two
Researchers fear iceberg may disrupt underwater ecosystems and block penguins looking for food
Strong currents have taken hold of a massive Antarctic iceberg that is on a collision course with South Georgia island, causing it to shift direction and lose a major chunk of mass, a scientist tracking its journey said on Friday.
As the iceberg, dubbed A68A, approached the western shelf edge of the south Atlantic island this week, it encountered strong currents, causing it to pivot nearly 180 degrees, according to Geraint Tarling, a biological oceanographer with the British Antarctic Survey.
Continue reading...Scientists plan mission to biggest iceberg as it drifts towards island
Team will study effects on environment of A-68A, which is heading for South Georgia
Scientists are preparing for an urgent mission to the world’s biggest iceberg, which is on a collision course with the island of South Georgia in the southern Atlantic Ocean.
The A-68A iceberg, which is larger than Luxembourg, broke off from the Larsen C ice shelf in Antarctica in 2017 and has been drifting towards the island ever since.
Continue reading...Why the penguin post office is desperate for some non-feathered customers
Based in Port Lockroy, Antarctica, it’s the post office at the bottom of the world. Now Ranulph Fiennes is calling for action to ensure it survives
Name: Penguin post office.
Age: Built in 1944.
Continue reading...Blue whale sightings off South Georgia raise hopes of recovery
After single sighting in 20 years of surveys, new expedition and analysis bring 58
When the Antarctic blue whale – the largest and loudest animal on the planet – was all but wiped out by whaling 50 years ago, the waters around South Georgia fell silent.
Twenty years of dedicated whale surveys from ships off the sub-Antarctic island between 1998 and 2018 resulted in only a single blue whale sighting. But a whale expedition this year and analysis by an international research team resulted in 58 blue whale sightings and numerous acoustic detections, raising hopes that the critically endangered mammal is finally recovering five decades after whaling was banned.
Continue reading...‘We knocked the bastard off’: rare photographs of Edmund Hillary’s Everest expedition
More than half a century ago, Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay became the first men to summit Everest. Now a collection of rare photos from Hillary’s life is up for auction in New Zealand, featuring scenes of the climbers tackling the world’s tallest peak
Continue reading...Earth has lost 28 trillion tonnes of ice in less than 30 years
‘Stunned’ scientists say there is little doubt global heating is to blame for the loss
A total of 28 trillion tonnes of ice have disappeared from the surface of the Earth since 1994. That is stunning conclusion of UK scientists who have analysed satellite surveys of the planet’s poles, mountains and glaciers to measure how much ice coverage lost because of global heating triggered by rising greenhouse gas emissions.
The scientists – based at Leeds and Edinburgh universities and University College London – describe the level of ice loss as “staggering” and warn that their analysis indicates that sea level rises, triggered by melting glaciers and ice sheets, could reach a metre by the end of the century.
Continue reading...Throng of new penguin colonies in Antarctica spotted from space
Satellite images reveal guano patches, boosting known emperor penguin colonies by 20%
Satellite images have revealed 11 previously unknown emperor penguin colonies in Antarctica, boosting the number of known colonies of the imperilled birds by 20%.
The discoveries were made by spotting the distinctive red-brown guano patches the birds leave on the ice. The finds were made possible by higher-resolution images from a new satellite, as previous scans were unable to pick up smaller colonies.
Continue reading...‘There’s still a choice’: New Zealand’s melting glaciers show the human fingerprints of climate change
New research has found extreme melting of the country’s glaciers in 2018 was at least ten times more likely due to human-caused global heating
Twice a year, glaciologist Lauren Vargo and her colleagues set up camp beside two small lakes close to New Zealand’s Brewster glacier. Each time the trek to carry the measuring stakes takes a little bit longer as the glacier’s terminus gets further away.
Dr Vargo, a native of Ohio now working at the Antarctic Research Centre at the Victoria University of Wellington, is studying New Zealand’s glaciers from the air and on the ice.
Continue reading...First active leak of sea-bed methane discovered in Antarctica
Researchers say potent climate-heating gas almost certainly escaping into atmosphere
The first active leak of methane from the sea floor in Antarctica has been revealed by scientists.
The researchers also found microbes that normally consume the potent greenhouse gas before it reaches the atmosphere had only arrived in small numbers after five years, allowing the gas to escape.
Continue reading...Antarctica: tiny algae turning snow green ‘could create new ecosystem’ – video
Antarctica is turning green due to the climate crisis and the phenomenon is potentially offering sustenance to other species, according to the first large-scale algae map of the peninsular by University of Cambridge scientists.
The map identifies 1,679 separate blooms of green snow algae, which together cover an area of 1.9 sq km, equating to a carbon sink of about 479 tonnes a year. This is equivalent to the emissions of about 875,000 petrol car journeys in the UK, though in global terms it is too small to make much of a difference to the planet’s carbon budget
Continue reading...Climate change is turning parts of Antarctica green, say scientists
Researchers map ‘beginning of new ecosystem’ as algae bloom across surface of melting snow
Scientists have created the first large-scale map of microscopic algae on the Antarctic peninsula as they bloom across the surface of the melting snow, tinting the surface green and potentially creating a source of nutrition for other species.
The British team behind the research believe these blooms will expand their range in the future because global heating is creating more of the slushy conditions they need to thrive.
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