Researchers from Denmark’s University of Copenhagen have gained new insight into the loss of ice mass in Greenland’s glaciers thanks to a chance discovery of 80-year-old photo plates discovered in a Danish basement.

It was used to help Apollo astronauts navigate in space, and has since been applied to problems as diverse as economics and weather forecasting, but Harvard scientists are now using a powerful statistical tool to not only track sea level rise over time, but to determine where the water causing the rise is coming from.

A joint team of UK and Australian researchers has found that two separate groups of Antarctic octopuses, from the Ross and Weddell seas on different sides of the continent, are almost genetically identical.

A large part of the Northern Hemisphere was in the midst of an unusual cold snap for nearly 500 years, from the Middle Ages through the early 19th century, in what scientists now call the “Little Ice Age.”

Scientists report in the journal Nature that an Antarctic ice sheet may start to melt rapidly in this century.