Latest Ice shelf 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...

Brett Smith for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online As the debate over climate change continues, so does the publication of studies that support or challenge the notion that human activity is the main driver of rising temperatures. According to a new study in Nature Geoscience, the dramatic thinning of glaciers in Western Antarctica is due to natural variation, and cannot be attributed directly to carbon emissions. "If we could look back at this region of Antarctica in the 1940s...

redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports - Your Universe Online A portion of the Antarctic ice sheet is warming nearly twice as quickly as experts had previously believed, which could increase the region's future contribution to rising sea levels, a team of researchers from the Ohio State University (OSU) has discovered. According to BBC News Environmental Correspondent Matt McGrath, the study authors analyzed temperature records from Byrd Station, a scientific outpost in the center of the...

National Science Foundation Drilling-related breakthroughs funded by NSF expected to advance "frontier science" in a variety of disciplines Three very large-scale, National Science Foundation-funded Antarctic science projects--investigating scientifically significant subjects as varied as life in extreme ecosystems, the fate of one of the world's largest ice sheets and the nature of abrupt global climate-change events--have recently each reached important technological milestones that...

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...

COLLEGE STATION, Texas, Nov. 28, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The melting rate of certain glaciers in Antarctica is unmistakably accelerating and the most direct link to global warming is in the unknown adjustment of the surrounding Southern Ocean. That leads to not only an uncertain future stability of the icy continent but also raises questions about the pace of sea level rise around the world, according to work by a Texas A&M University researcher. (Logo:...

April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Global warming is causing sea levels to rise faster than previously expected and geologist Bill Hay from the University of Colorado Boulder has a theory to explain why. The most recent IPCC report released in 2007 projected a global sea level rise between 0.2 and 0.5 meters by 2100, but current sea level measurements meet or exceed the high end of that range. This suggests a rise of one meter or more by the end of the century....

Brett Smith for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online Over the past few years, researchers have consistently shown an overall decrease in the size of the Arctic ice cap—particularly during the summer months when the most melting occurs. However, a new study from NASA scientists has shown that this melt off around the Arctic is accompanied by the record expansion of sea ice around Antarctica, when the Southern Hemisphere is experiencing its colder temperatures of the year....

WASHINGTON, Oct. 12, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Scientists and flight crew members with Operation IceBridge, NASA's airborne mission to study Earth's changing polar ice, are beginning another campaign over Antarctica. Now in its fourth year, IceBridge's return to the Antarctic comes almost a year after the discovery of a large rift in the continent's Pine Island Glacier. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO) The first science flight of the campaign began...

Brett Smith for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online A team of 12 British scientists are about to embark on a grueling two-and-a-half month expedition to search for life in Lake Ellsworth, which is located 1.6 miles below the surface of the Antarctic ice sheet. The British Antarctic Survey expedition, which also aims to find out the overall stability of the ice sheet, will be closely observed by NASA as a model for future space missions to the icy moons of Jupiter where it is believed...