East Antarctica has long been hailed as a bastion of continuity in the rapidly unraveling Antarctic. The West Antarctic is the landscape where ice goes to die, while the higher elevation, colder eastern portion of the continent has been viewed as a stable landscape largely separated from rising temperatures and warm…
The RSS Sir David Attenborough—the polar exploration vessel that, in April 2016, participants in an internet poll overwhelmingly voted to christen Boaty McBoatface—launched on Saturday, with defensive research officials still defending their decision to override the results of the vote.
It was a year ago at this time that Antarctica’s Larsen C Ice Shelf gave birth to Iceberg A-68, one of the largest chunks of ice ever recorded. A new timelapse video made from satellite imagery shows the rift, calving, and subsequent journey of the iceberg over the past 12 months.
As one might expect, the desolate and remote East Antarctic Plateau is home to Earth’s coldest temperatures. What is surprising, however, is that these bitter temps are even colder than previously thought—reaching nearly -148 degrees Fahrenheit (-100 degrees Celsius).
A team of scientists has learned that the ground beneath West Antarctica’s most vulnerable glaciers is weirdly bouncy. The finding suggests this critical sector of the ice sheet might have a hidden defense against runaway collapse, but how much that helps us depends on if we take action to rein in climate change.
Three trillion tons of ice is an near impossible thing to wrap your head around. Even the standard comparisons—it’s 1.2 billion Olympic swimming pools—don’t really make it compute any better.
There’s no shortage of going-ons on Earth that astronauts can see from space: auroras, towering clouds, volcanic eruptions. Now, there’s a grim addition to the list: a (once) massive iceberg that’s got a date with death.
If there’s a final frontier on the surface of our planet, it’s East Antarctica, a vast region of largely-unexplored mountains and canyons covered in a mantle of ice thousands of feet thick. The latest indication of how little we know about East Antarctica? We basically just learned it’s seismically active.
More than scientific research goes down in Antarctica. With Pride Month officially starting Friday, celebrations are popping off at all ends of the world—including near the South Pole. Who said a continent devoted to ice, climate and Earth science can’t also be a place for the queerios of the world to party? After…
Lessons on climate change don’t require wonky charts or boring lectures. They can sometimes be as simple—and cute—as an animated video featuring penguins, an elephant seal, and some researchers ready for the freezing temperatures of Antarctica.
Antarctica’s icy mantle hides a truly fantastical world, and we’re still trying to understand its contours. Case in point: a new study has revealed three monstrous canyons on par with the Grand Canyon. The discovery is both wow-worthy and vital to understanding what will happen to Antarctica’s ice as it melts.
Imagine an unbroken chronological record, dating back a million years, of temperature and atmospheric conditions on Earth. Such a thing could indeed exist in the form of an ancient and undisturbed Antarctic ice core, according to a recent survey.
In recent years, warm winds have caused winter temperatures on the Antarctic Peninsula to spike well above freezing. The winds have spurred major melt, causing lakes to form on ice sheets that can eventually accelerate their collapse. Oh, and climate change could make the conditions that spurred the winds worse. Great!
Our planet is a cool and good planet. To prove this point, I would simply point you to the map above.
Michelle LaRue has a problem: She only has one set of eyes.
The world’s largest hunk of ice, the Antarctic ice sheet, holds enough frozen water to put cities like Miami several hundred feet under. How much Antarctica shrinks in the future will depend on the balance between what’s melting away, and what’s being added when it snows.
As temperatures outside dipped to well below freezing, and as blizzards pounded the Antarctic research station, German scientists were carefully tending to a remarkable veggie garden—one requiring no soil or natural sunlight. The success of their first harvest, which produced vibrant-looking lettuce, radishes,…
The two most important words you need to know to understand the fate of our coastlines are “grounding line.” Those words describe where Antarctica’s voluminous ice shelves begin to float, holding back a wall of ice on land.
Our favorite autonomous underwater vehicle, Boaty McBoatface, has completed a two-month mission in which it explored a massive ice shelf in Antarctica’s southern Weddell Sea. Swimming nearly a kilometer beneath the surface, and with hardly any human assistance or oversight, Boaty spent over 50 hours directly beneath…
