By Sev Kender 19 October 2017 (The Conversation) – The vast expanse of the Antarctic is a region of the world particularly vulnerable to climate change, where ice loss has the potential to significantly increase sea levels. Now, for possibly the first time in 7,000 years, a phenomenon known as “upwelling” (the upward flow of […]
By Manisha Ganguly 13 October 2017 (CNN) – A penguin colony in Antarctica has suffered a massive breeding failure, with only two chicks surviving the disaster. Terre Adélie (Adélie Land) is home to more than 18,000 pairs of Adélie penguins, but this year almost all the seabirds’ babies starved to death, a situation one expert […]
By Carol Rasmussen 19 September 2017(Jet Propulsion Laboratory) – A NASA study has located the Antarctic glaciers that accelerated the fastest between 2008 and 2014 and finds that the most likely cause of their speedup is an observed influx of warm water into the bay where they’re located.The water was only 1 to 2 degrees […]
By Erik Ortiz 27 September 2017 (NBC News) – After breaking free from Antarctica this summer, a giant iceberg roughly the size of Delaware is moving on to open waters. New satellite images from TerraSAR-X show the iceberg known as A68 has begun to drift away from the Larsen C ice shelf and is being […]
By Mark Floyd 23 August 2017CORVALLIS, Oregon (OSU) – Scientists concerned that global warming may release huge stores of methane from reservoirs beneath Arctic tundra and deposits of marine hydrates – a theory known as the “clathrate gun” hypothesis – have turned to geologic history to search for evidence of significant methane release during past […]
By Alister Doyle 26 June 2017 OSLO (Reuters) – The rise in global sea levels has accelerated since the 1990s amid rising temperatures, with a thaw of Greenland’s ice sheet pouring ever more water into the oceans, scientists said on Monday.The annual rate of sea level rise increased to 3.3 millimeters (0.13 inch) in 2014 […]
By Adrian Luckman and Martin O’Leary 19 July 2017 (Project MIDAS) – On July 12 2017, data from the Sentinel-1 satellite confirmed the calving from the Larsen C Ice Shelf of Iceberg A68, a slab of ice 5,800 km in area and weighing more than 1 trillion tonnes. New Sentinel-1 interferometry data from July 18 […]
By Malia Wollan 18 July 2017 (The New York Times) — It was a freakishly warm evening last October when a maintenance worker first discovered the water — torrents of it, rushing into the entrance tunnel of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a storage facility dug some 400 feet into the side of a mountain […]
By Martin O’Leary and Adrian Luckman 12 July 2017 (Project MIDAS) – A one trillion tonne iceberg – one of the biggest ever recorded – has calved away from the Larsen C Ice Shelf in Antarctica. The calving occurred sometime between Monday 10th July and Wednesday 12th July 2017, when a 5,800 square km section […]
By Adrian Luckman and Martin O’Leary 7 July 2017 (Project MIDAS) – As the Larsen C ice shelf moves closer to calving one of the largest icebergs on record, there are clear signs of changes in the part of the shelf which is about to calve. In late June 2017, the soon-to-be iceberg tripled in […]