Latest Geography of Antarctica Stories

Lawrence LeBlond for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Several bodies of water around the world are known for their salty content. Among the most well-known are the Great Salt Lake in Utah and the Dead Sea. But these bodies of water pale in comparison to Don Juan Pond in Antarctica, known as the saltiest body of water on Earth. The pond, situated in the McMurdo Dry Valleys of the harsh, icy continent, keeps from freezing because of its salt-rich composition. But why this landlocked...

Lawrence LeBlond for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Three Canadians who were aboard a small plane flying over the Antarctic are presumably missing after an emergency locator started transmitting a signal Wednesday night. Matters were complicated when bad weather forced a search and rescue mission to go on hold. The flight was going from the US-operated McMurdo Station near the South Pole to Zucchelli Station, an Italian research base in Terra Nova Bay. The emergency locator began...

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...

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...

Part of NSF's International Polar Year research portfolio, the six-nation study indicates that shallow-water populations have little in common Differing contributions of freshwater from glaciers and streams to the Arctic and Southern oceans appear to be responsible for the fact that the majority of microbial communities that thrive near the surface at the Poles share few common members, according to an international team of researchers, some of whom were supported by the National Science...

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...

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...

Thirty-eight million years ago, tropical jungles thrived in what are now the cornfields of the American Midwest and furry marsupials wandered temperate forests in what is now the frozen Antarctic.The temperature differences of that era, known as the late Eocene, between the equator and Antarctica were half what they are today.A debate has been ongoing in the scientific community about what changes in our global climate system led to such a major shift from the more tropical, greenhouse...

Young penguins in the Antarctic may be dying for lack of food, as melting sea ice reduces the numbers of small fish they consume as their primary food source, according to a new study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).The researchers found that just 10 percent of baby penguins tagged are returning in two to four years to breed, a drop of 40-50 percent since the 1970s.The study indicates that species often considered likely "winners" of...

An Indian mission leader said Saturday that the country will have its first scientific expedition to the South Pole on Monday to analyze environmental changes in the frozen continent over the past 1,000 years. Rasik Ravindra, head of the National Center for Antarctic and Ocean Research, is going to lead the team of seven Indian scientists on the 40-day expedition from an Indian research base in the Antarctic to the South Pole. "No one has taken the route we will be taking to the South...