July 31 (New Scientist) – ANTARCTICA is rising like a cheese soufflé: slowly but surely. Lost ice due to climate change and left-over momentum from the end of the last big ice age mean the buoyant continent is heaven-bound. Donald Argus of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and colleagues used 15 years of […]
By John D. Cox28 July 2011 Before the last ice age, during a warm era some 125,000 years ago that was comparable to modern times, scientists know that the oceans reached levels that were some 15 to 20 feet higher than they are today. What they don’t know is, where did the extra water come […]
Contact: Patrick Lynch, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., 757-897-2047, patrick.lynch@nasa.gov 25 July 2011 An international team of researchers has combined data from multiple sources to provide the clearest account yet of how much glacial ice surges into the sea following the collapse of Antarctic ice shelves. The work by researchers at the University […]
By Daniel Stolte, University Communications 14 July 2011 Melting ice sheets contributed much more to rising sea levels than thermal expansion of warming ocean waters during the Last Interglacial Period, a UA-led team of researchers has found. The results further suggest that ocean levels continue to rise long after warming of the atmosphere levels off. […]
By Jessica Marshall11 Apr 2011 Numbers of Chinstrap and Adélie penguins in the Antarctic Peninsula region have dropped by more than 50 percent in the last 30 years, driven mainly by dramatic declines in supplies of tiny, shrimp-like krill, their main prey, says a new study. Krill, meanwhile, have declined by 40 to 80 percent, […]
Caption by Mike Carlowicz, with background from Alan BuisMarch 26, 2011 According to a new NASA-funded satellite study, the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are losing mass at an accelerating pace and are overtaking ice loss from mountain glaciers and ice caps to become the dominant contributor to global sea level rise. The graph above […]
By Eric NiilerMarch 20, 2011 Sven Thatje has been predicting an invasion of deep-water crabs into shallow Antarctic waters for the past several years. But the biologist and his colleagues got their first look at the march of the seafloor predators while riding on an icebreaker across frozen Antarctic seas this winter. The ship towed […]
Caption by Holli RiebeekMarch 10, 2011 Early in February 1902, Captain Robert Falcon Scott sailed into McMurdo Sound and docked his ship, the Discovery, in a small, sheltered bay at the tip of a rocky peninsula on Ross Island. Eager to begin a year exploring one of Earth’s last untouched places, Scott and his men […]
ScienceDaily (Mar. 8, 2011) — The Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are losing mass at an accelerating pace, according to a new NASA-funded satellite study. The findings of the study — the longest to date of changes in polar ice sheet mass — suggest these ice sheets are overtaking ice loss from Earth’s mountain glaciers […]
By Christine Dell’Amore, National Geographic NewsPublished February 28, 2011 “Crazy green” pools teeming with life have been found among remote Antarctic sea ice, scientists say—and they may be a global warming boon. Observed in the little-studied Amundsen Sea (see map), the brilliant blooms owe their colors to chlorophyll, a pigment in various types of phytoplankton, […]
