King crab invasion of Antarctic waters is ‘quite frightening’

A warmer Antarctica makes a hospitable home for these crabs, endangering an entire ecosystem that has no defenses against them. By Eric NiilerTue Feb 8, 2011 07:00 AM ET McMURDO STATION, Antarctica — Warming waters along the Antarctic peninsula have opened the door to shell-crushing king crabs that threaten a unique ecosystem on the seafloor, […]

Graph of the Day: Deepwater Channel Beneath Pine Island Glacier, 2009

Caption by Kathryn Hansen and Michael CarlowiczJanuary 19, 2011 In October 2009, a series of flights over Antarctica led to the discovery of a hidden feature beneath a floating ice shelf. Scientists participating in NASA’s Operation IceBridge mapped the water depth and seafloor topography beneath Pine Island Glacier and found a deepwater channel—a likely pathway […]

Climate change to continue to year 3000 in best-case scenarios

New paper in Nature Geoscience examines inertia of carbon dioxide emissions Contact: Jennifer Myers, myers@ucalgary.ca, University of Calgary 9-Jan-2011 New research indicates the impact of rising CO2 levels in the Earth’s atmosphere will cause unstoppable effects to the climate for at least the next 1000 years, causing researchers to estimate a collapse of the West […]

Photo gallery: The trials and tribulations of Adélie penguins in a rapidly warming Antarctic

By David DeFranza, Washington, DCon January 6, 2011 Between 2005 and 2006, author Fen Montaigne traveled to Antarctica with Fraser to observe the life cycle of the penguins. “This colony was once much larger,” Montaigne says, “but in recent years all the Adélie colonies in the northwestern Antarctic Peninsula have been in steep decline as […]

Antarctic snowfall linked to drought in southwest Australia

By Lee-Maree GalloOctober 25, 2010 – 11:36AM Increased snowfall in the Antarctic has been linked to drought in south-western Australia. Researchers, including Australian Antarctic Division principal research scientist Tas van Ommen, have been analysing ice cores in the Antarctic and revealed snowfall variability may be linked to climate in the Southern Ocean and the South-West. […]

Greenland, West Antarctic ice caps melting at half the speed previously estimated

By News StaffSeptember 6th 2010 01:00 AM The Greenland and West Antarctic ice caps are melting at half the speed previously predicted, shows a team from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Delft University of Technology (TU Delft, The Netherlands) and SRON Netherlands Institute for Space Research in Nature Geoscience. The melting of the ice caps has […]

West Antarctic ice shelf collapsed during warming event 125,000 years ago

By Alister Doyle, ReutersWednesday, 1 September 2010 Tiny marine creatures found on the seabed on opposite sides of West Antarctic give a strong hint of the effects of sea level rise, say scientists. The discovery of very similar colonies of bryozoans, animals that anchor themselves to the seabed, in both the Ross and Weddell Seas […]

Argentina has colder winter than Antarctica, spurring record power imports

By Rodrigo OrihuelaAug 3, 2010 7:45 AM PDT Argentina is importing record amounts of energy as the coldest winter in 40 years drives up demand and causes natural-gas shortages, prompting Dow Chemical Co. and steelmaker Siderar SAIC to scale back production. Electricity supplied from Brazil and Paraguay rose to a daily combined record of about […]

Climate change could leave penguins in the dark

By John PlattJul 29, 2010 12:40 PM Few animals can live totally in the dark, and penguins are no exception. But new research shows that climate change could soon rob Adélie penguins (Pygoscelis adeliae) of the sunlight they need to survive, and that could drive them into extinction. The problem comes from melting sea ice, […]

‘Weak underbelly’ of Pine Island Glacier widens, contributes to global sea level rise

Issue date: 20 Jun 2010Number: 08/2010 New results from an investigation into Antarctica’s potential contribution to sea level rise are reported this week (Sunday 20 June) by scientists from the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory (LDEO) and the National Oceanography Centre in the journal Nature Geoscience. Thinning ice in West Antarctica is currently […]

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