Latest British Antarctic Territory Stories

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online A new scientific research facility in Antarctica has now officially opened, helping to bring a modern twist to adventuring to the most southern part of our world. The Antarctic Research Station has opened 100 years after Captain Robert Falcon Scott's Antarctica expeditions, replacing the 20-year-old Halley V facility. The Halley VI Research Station is the sixth to be built on the floating Brunt Ice Shelf, the first station...

Alan McStravick for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online The uncertainty of future sea level rise is getting a little clearer thanks to research being conducted by a team comprised of scientists from the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), the Alfred Wegner Institute for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) and the University of Tromsø. Their study, entitled ‘Grounding-line retreat of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet from inner Pine Island Bay’, is being published in this month’s edition of...

redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports - Your Universe Online The largest remaining Antarctic ice shelf contains several cracks and crevasses that could make it prone to collapse, but also areas in which different types of frozen water blend together to create areas of bendable ice that help hold it together, according to a new study presented late last week. Experts at the University of Colorado, Boulder's Cooperative Institute for Research in the Environmental Sciences (CIRES) discovered...

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...

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Scientists believe they have discovered a hidden rift valley that may be contributing to ice loss in West Antarctica. University of Aberdeen and British Antarctic Survey (BAS) experts made the discovery below Ferrigno Ice Stream, which is a very remote region that has only been visited once before. The team has reveled that the ice-filled ancient rift basin is connected to the warming ocean, which impacts ice flow and loss. The...

Brett Smith for Redorbit.com 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. This suggests that the two seas, which are now separated by the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, were once joined together, possibly a result of the partial collapse of the continental ice sheet. Researchers analyzed the genes of 450 Turquet's octopuses...

Scientists report in the journal Nature that an Antarctic ice sheet may start to melt rapidly in this century. The finding, made by climate researchers of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in the Helmholtz Association, refute a widely believed theory that ice shelves in the Weddell Sea would not be affected by global warming due to the peripheral location of the sea. "The Weddell Sea was not really on the screen because we all thought that unlike the Amundsen...

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...

Scientists have created a detailed map called BEDMAP of Antarctica's rock bed that lies underneath its icy surface. The map gives a view of the landscape beneath the ice, and incorporates decades of survey data acquired by planes, satellites, ships and even people on dogsleds. In the map, the highest elevations are marked in red/black, while the light blue color shows the extent of the continental shelf.  The lowest elevations are dark blue, some of which lie below today's seal level....