Category Archives: Antarctica

Researchers rethink life in a cold climate after Antarctic find

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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.

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Wallet lost in Antarctica turns up in California 53 years later

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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.”

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‘A real bad precedent’: Australia criticised for Antarctica airport plan

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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.

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China helps evacuate sick Australian from Antarctica in five-day mission

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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.

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Huge Antarctic iceberg headed towards South Georgia breaks in two

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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.

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Scientists plan mission to biggest iceberg as it drifts towards island

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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.

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Blue whale sightings off South Georgia raise hopes of recovery

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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.

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Earth has lost 28 trillion tonnes of ice in less than 30 years

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‘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.

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Throng of new penguin colonies in Antarctica spotted from space

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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.

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‘There’s still a choice’: New Zealand’s melting glaciers show the human fingerprints of climate change

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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.

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First active leak of sea-bed methane discovered in Antarctica

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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.

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Antarctica: tiny algae turning snow green ‘could create new ecosystem’ – video

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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

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Climate change is turning parts of Antarctica green, say scientists

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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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Rare long-necked dinosaur that roamed the polar world unearthed in Australia

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Discovery of a single vertebra of an elaphrosaur in Victoria hugely expands known range of the group, which had teeth as juveniles but beaks as adults

A dinosaur relative of T. rex and Velociraptor with an unusually long neck, and which may have transitioned from predator to plant-eater as it reached adulthood, has been unearthed in Victoria.

The elaphrosaur was a member of the theropod family of dinosaurs that included all of the predatory species. It stood about the height of a small emu, measuring 2m from its head to the end of a long tail, and had short arms, each ending in four fingers.

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Antarctica was warm enough for rainforest near south pole 90m years ago

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Experts say new evidence from Cretaceous period ‘shows us what carbon dioxide can do’

Think of Antarctica and it is probably sweeping expanses of ice, and the odd penguin, that come to mind. But at the time of the dinosaurs the continent was covered in swampy rainforest.

Now experts say they have found the most southerly evidence yet of this environment in plant material extracted from beneath the seafloor in west Antarctica.

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Global efforts on ozone help reverse southern jet stream damage

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Jet stream appears to have stopped moving south and may be moving back towards normal

International cooperation on ozone-depleting chemicals is helping to return the southern jet stream to a normal state after decades of human-caused disruption, a study shows.

Scientists say the findings prove there is the capacity to heal damaged climate systems if governments act promptly and in coordination to deal with the causes.

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Earth just had hottest January since records began, data shows

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  • Average global temperature 2.5F above 20th-century average
  • Antarctic has begun February with several temperature spikes

Last month was the hottest January on record over the world’s land and ocean surfaces, with average temperatures exceeding anything in the 141 years of data held by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Related: Antarctic temperature rises above 20C for first time on record

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