Antarctica

Hobart, Tasmania - 10/28/2009 - The Pew Environment Group today called on the world’s governing body for conserving Antarctic marine life to geographically spread out krill catches in the Southern Ocean. This would prevent the concentration of the fishery from significantly reducing the amount of krill available for key predators including whales, penguins and seals.

Listen to an audio recording (MP3) of a press call on this topic.    » read more »

Oct. 8, 2009 -- WASHINGTON -- NASA begins a series of flights Oct. 15 to study changes to Antarctica's sea ice, glaciers and ice sheets. The flights are part of Operation Ice Bridge, a six-year campaign that is the largest airborne survey ever made of ice at Earth's polar regions.

Researchers will work from NASA's DC-8, an airborne laboratory equipped with laser mapping instruments, ice-penetrating radar and gravity instruments. Data collected from the mission will help scientists better predict how changes to the massive Antarctic ice sheet will contribute to future sea level rise around the world.    » read more »

The melting of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet may cause sea level to rise more than previously predicted for some regions, including the U.S. coastline, researchers estimate.

In their Brevium article in the 6 February issue of Science, Jerry Mitrovica of the University of Toronto and coauthors note that most projections of future sea-level change, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's fourth assessment report, assume that upon a collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, meltwater would spread uniformly across the oceans.

In their study, the authors use computer simulations to show that sea-level rise would actually be higher in the oceans bordering North America and in the Indian Ocean than it would be in the rest of the world.    » read more »

July 17, 2008 -- A lone granite boulder found against all odds high atop a glacier in Antarctica may provide additional key evidence to support a theory that parts of the southernmost continent once were connected to North America hundreds of millions of years ago.

Writing in the July 11 edition of the journal Science, an international team of U.S. and Australian investigators describe their findings, which were made in the Transantarctic Mountains, and their significance to the problem of piecing together what an ancient supercontinent, called Rodinia, looked like. The U.S. investigators were funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF).    » read more »

15 January 2008 -- A group of climate researchers says there is evidence that global warming is causing the Antarctic ice cap to melt more quickly than it did 10 years ago.

The scientists said Monday they used satellite data to monitor the Antarctic coastline. They found the ice sheet on the Earth's southern pole lost 59 percent more ice in 2006 than it did in 1996.

The researchers say western Antarctica lost 132 billion tons of ice in 2006, enough to raise worldwide sea levels by 0.5 millimeter.    » read more »

Nov. 27, 2007 -- WASHINGTON - A team of researchers from NASA, the U.S. Geological Survey, the National Science Foundation and the British Antarctic Survey unveiled a newly completed map of Antarctica today that is expected to revolutionize research of the continent's frozen landscape.

The Landsat Image Mosaic of Antarctica is a result of NASA's state-of-the-art satellite technologies and an example of the prominent role NASA continues to play as a world leader in the development and flight of Earth-observing satellites.    » read more »

Nov. 14, 2007 -- WASHINGTON - NASA will use the cold, harsh, isolated landscape of Antarctica to test one of its concepts for astronaut housing on the moon. The agency is sending a prototype inflatable habitat to Antarctica to see how it stands up during a year of use.    » read more »

Nov. 8, 2007 -- WASHINGTON -- NASA, the National Science Foundation and ILC Dover invite the news media to view an Antarctic-bound inflatable habitat at 10 a.m. EST, Wednesday, Nov. 14, at ILC's facility at One Moonwalker Rd., Frederica, Del.    » read more »

10 November 2007 -- U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon says that after seeing the effect of climate change on Antarctica, he believes the world is "on the verge of a catastrophe."

Mr. Ban flew to a Chilean Air Force base Friday for a briefing with scientists on the world's southernmost continent. He also took an aerial tour of the famous Collins Glaciers, and visited the Antarctic research bases of Uruguay and South Korea, his home country.    » read more »

New York City, 01 August 2007 (By Kane Farabaugh) -- During the Cold War, Greenland was a strategic location for the United States military to track and detect Soviet aircraft and ballistic missiles. The military established radar and tracking sites throughout Greenland's ice sheet. The only way in and out of the remote facilities was by specially equipped aircraft. Since 1975, that mission has belonged to an Air Force unit based in New York state -- the 109th Airlift Wing.    » read more »

20 June 2007 -- Climate change is creating new realities for many communities across the globe, threatening livelihoods and producing environmental refugees in some cases, and presenting new opportunities in others.

The Ganges River, which flows across northern India, has been revered for millennia by millions of Hindus as a sacred source of healing and enlightenment. Now, according to the United Nations, the glacier that feeds the Ganges is shrinking and could disappear by 2030.

A massive iceberg in McMurdo Sound after it broke off the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica    » read more »

May 15, 2007 -- WASHINGTON - A team of NASA and university scientists has found clear evidence that extensive areas of snow melted in west Antarctica in January 2005 in response to warm temperatures. This was the first widespread Antarctic melting ever detected with NASA's QuikScat satellite and the most significant melt observed using satellites during the past three decades. The affected regions encompass a combined area as big as California.    » read more »

May 01, 2007 -- MONTGOMERY – Thanks to the ACCESS distance learning program, students at 13 Alabama schools on Wednesday will be connected by videoconferencing with UAB scientists in Antarctica, and Alabama Governor Bob Riley will be at one of the schools to participate in this unique live learning event.

ACCESS (Alabama Connecting Classrooms, Educators and Students Statewide) is a program first proposed by Governor Riley in 2005. It is a distance learning initiative that uses integrated technology to connect teachers and students with advanced level courses and electives.    » read more »