Latest Antarctic Peninsula Stories

1000-year Antarctic Peninsula climate reconstruction A new 1000-year Antarctic Peninsula climate reconstruction shows that summer ice melting has intensified almost ten-fold, and mostly since the mid 20th Century. Summer ice melt affects the stability of Antarctic ice shelves and glaciers. The research, published this week in the journal Nature Geoscience, adds new knowledge to the international effort that is required to understand the causes of environmental change in Antarctica and...

Alan McStravick for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online A new study by NASA and the British Antarctic Survey tries to explain the increase of ice cover in the Antarctic that is seemingly contrary to the effects of climate change that have been witnessed over the previous two decades. In their report, they purport they have the first direct evidence that this increase in sea ice cover is due to changing winds that have had an impact on the changes to Antarctic sea ice drift. The...

April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online New research, partially funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), shows that the breeding population of chinstrap penguins has significantly declined as temperatures have increased on the Antarctic Peninsula. Changing climatic conditions, rather than the impact of tourism, has the greatest effect on the chinstrap population. The findings of this study, conducted by a research team with the Antarctic Site Inventory (ASI), have...

Lawrence LeBlond for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online The Antarctic Peninsula has been continually shrinking for centuries, since long before the Industrial Revolution, according to an international team of researchers. However, rapid warming over the past 100 years has been unusual and, if it continues, the ice shelf could be on par for a complete collapse. Temperatures in the Antarctic Peninsula began rising around 600 years ago, occurring naturally. This was long before manmade...

Proposal follows first continent-wide survey of Antarctic biogeography An international team of scientists have published the first continent-wide assessment of the Antarctic's biogeography, and propose that the landmass should be divided into 15 distinct conservation regions to protect the continent from invasive alien species. The team's findings are published in Diversity and Distributions, while the authors' proposals were outlined today at a lecture to the Antarctic Treaty...

As ESA’s Envisat satellite marks ten years in orbit, it continues to observe the rapid retreat of one of Antarctica’s ice shelves due to climate warming. One of the satellite’s first observations following its launch on 1 March 2002 was of break-up of a main section of the Larsen B ice shelf in Antarctica – when 3200 sq km of ice disintegrated within a few days due to mechanical instabilities of the ice masses triggered by climate warming. Now, with ten years of observations...

As temperatures warm along Antarctica’s outer fringes, it allows for invasive plants and organisms to be carried in inadvertently by visiting scientists and tourists, putting the pristine ecosystem at risk, researchers have found. An international team of researchers, writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), said they scoured the clothes and boots of those visiting the southernmost continent and found that most were carrying plant seeds. The risks from...

An international team of researchers has combined data from multiple sources to provide the clearest account yet of how much glacial ice surges into the sea following the collapse of Antarctic ice shelves.The work by researchers at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), the Laboratoire d'Etudes en Géophysique et Océanographie Spatiales, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique at the University of Toulouse, France, and the University of Colorado's National Snow and Ice...

Analysis of direct climate record shows Antarctic tundra persisted until 12 million years agoA painstaking examination of the first direct and detailed climate record from the continental shelves surrounding Antarctica reveals that the last remnant of Antarctic vegetation existed in a tundra landscape on the continent's northern peninsula about 12 million years ago. The research, which was led by researchers at Rice University and Louisiana State University, appears online this week and will...

Scientists have observed a "super-aggregation" of more than 300 humpback whales gorging on the largest swarm of Antarctic krill seen in more than 20 years in bays along the Western Antarctic Peninsula.The sightings, made in waters still largely ice-free deep into austral autumn, suggest the previously little-studied bays are important late-season foraging grounds for the endangered whales. But they also highlight how rapid climate change is affecting the region.The Duke...