Latest Chilean Antarctic Territory Stories

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...

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...