Antarctica
Research presented today at the International Scientific Congress on Climate Change in Copenhagen shows that the upper range of sea level rise by 2100 could be in the range of about one meter, or possibly more. In the lower end of the spectrum it looks increasingly unlikely that sea level rise will be much less than 50 cm by 2100.
There has not been much information forthcoming with regard to the CDC study concerning the investigation taking place. CDC has said that there "might" be information by the end of the year. Holding my breath....?
Ice in Antarctica suddenly appeared -- in geologic terms -- about 35 million years ago. For the previous 100 million years the continent had been essentially ice-free.
Flying twin-engine light aircraft the equivalent of several trips around the globe and establishing a network of seismic instruments across an area the size of Texas, a U.S.-led, international team of scientists has not only verified the existence of a mountain range that is suspected to have caused the massive East Antarctic Ice Sheet to form, but also has created a detailed picture of the rug
Two BYU researchers who just returned from Antarctica are reporting a hardy worm that withstands its cold climate by cranking out antifreeze.
Scientists aboard the U.S. research vessel Laurence M Gould, 10,000 miles from Washington off Antarctica, held their own presidential inaugural celebration on Jan. 20. Stopped in desolate, icy seas for three days to do climate-change research, they dubbed their temporary study area Ocean Station Obama.
Popularized by the 2005 movie “March of the Penguins,” emperor penguins could be headed toward extinction in at least part of their range before the end of the century.
The Antarctic Peninsula juts into the Southern Ocean, reaching farther north than any other part of the continent. The southernmost reach of global warming was believed to be limited to this narrow strip of land, while the rest of the continent was presumed to be cooling or stable. Not so.
U.S. and Russian icebreakers have cleared a path through the sea ice of McMurdo Sound to allow the annual resupply of McMurdo Station, the National Science Foundation's logistics hub in Antarctica. The U.S. Coast Guard icebreaker Polar Star and the Russian icebreaker Krasin escorted the U.S. Navy fuel tanker USNS Paul Buck to the ice pier at McMurdo Station in late January to unload its cargo. The tanker unloaded about eight million gallons of fuel in 48 hours. The Paul Buck left McMurdo on Jan. 31.
University of South Florida chemist Bill Baker, who spends much of his time diving in the frigid waters of Antarctica retrieving tunicates, blob-like marine animals, has isolated a compound in tunicate biochemistry that may fight melanoma, a type of skin cancer rising at alarming rates. "Tunicates have proven to be an important source of bioactive natural products," said Baker, who experimented with the tunicate Synioicum adareanum, retrieved from the shallow waters around Anvers Island. "We isolated a natural product in the species and sent it to the National Cancer Institute for testing against 60 different cancer cell lines. NCI conclude the compounded inhibited melanoma, a form of skin cancer that is rising in prevalence."
Flying near the edge of space, a NASA scientific balloon broke the flight record for duration and distance. It soared for nearly 42 days, making three orbits around the South Pole. The record-breaking balloon, almost as large as one and one half football fields, carried the Cosmic Ray Energetics And Mass (CREAM) experiment. CREAM is designed to explore the supernova acceleration limit of cosmic rays, the relativistic gas of protons, electrons and heavy nuclei arriving at Earth from outside the solar system.
Newly published North Carolina State University research into the evolution of birds shows the first definitive fossil proof linking close relatives of living birds to a time when dinosaurs roamed the earth. Research by paleontologist Dr. Julia A. Clarke, an assistant professor in the marine, earth and atmospheric sciences department at NC State, and colleagues provides unprecedented fossil proof that some close cousins to living bird species coexisted with dinosaurs more than 65 million years ago. Information from a new avian species called Vegavis iaai indicates that these birds lived in the Cretaceous period and must have survived the Cretaceous/Tertiary (K/T) mass extinction event that included the disappearance of all other dinosaurs.
In a United Nations-backed project, a two-masted ship will set sail this month from the tip of South America for Antarctica to witness first-hand the impacts of global warming and environmental change on the world's most southerly continent. The expedition by the Tara, which is supported by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), is scheduled to take one month and will take it to various areas including the northern Weddell Sea.
A longstanding theory that provides much of the basis for our understanding of climate change – that the mile-thick ice sheet covering Antarctica developed because of a shift in ocean currents millions of years ago – has been challenged by Purdue University scientists.
Though climate scientists have theorized for decades that the circulation of warm ocean currents was responsible for keeping Antarctica largely ice-free during the Eocene epoch prior to 35 million years ago, a series of deep-sea core samples taken recently from the ocean floor south of Australia indicates that this theory needs reworking. The sampled sediments, which were deposited during the period when Australia and Antarctica were beginning to drift apart, show that cold-loving plankton, including diatoms and dinoflagellates, were common in the waters then located to the east of the two then-adjacent continents.
What happens when the largest free floating thing on the planet crashes? We might find out in a couple of days. NASA satellites have witnessed a 100-mile-long iceberg near McMurdo Research station move like a battering ram toward Drygalski Ice Tongue. "It's a clash of the titans, a radical and uncommon event," says Robert Bindshadler, a researcher at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, and if the two giant slabs of ice collide, we could see one of the best demolition derbies on the planet.
