Core Truths
WAIS Divide ice records past environmental changes with implications for the future
Twenty years ago, Kendrick Taylor and his colleagues first conceived of drilling for a deep ice core in the middle of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) while working to extract one in Greenland.
Ten years ago, he wrote the science plan for the WAIS Divide Ice Core project.
“And now we’re halfway through the ice sheet 10 years later after finding the perfect spot to take an ice core, building a highly advanced drill, and constructing a camp to support the work,” said Taylor, ruefully shaking his head, during an interview at the National Ice Core Laboratory (NICL) in the Denver Federal Center where processing sections of the ice core is under way.
“I’ll feel really good when we get to the bottom and can fully focus on to the next phase — cranking through the data,” added Taylor, a research scientist at the Desert Research Institute in Nevada and the chief scientist for the WAIS Divide project, which is funded by the National Science Foundation.
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Ramping Up
Flights for 2010 winfly season scheduled to arrive week early using night-vision goggles
The first sunrise at McMurdo Station following the dark, cold winter isn’t until Aug. 19. That’s nearly a week after the first Air Force C-17 Globemaster III is scheduled to land on an ice runway with passengers and cargo, ending nearly six months of isolation for the 198 people at the U.S. Antarctic Program’s largest research station.
Seven flights are planned during the winter fly-in (Winfly) period, beginning on Aug. 13. Winfly is the time between winter and the summer when additional support personnel, such as carpenters and cooks, arrive to prepare the station for the upcoming science field season.
U.S. Air Force crews from the 62nd and 446th Airlift Wings at Joint Base Lewis-McChord (formerly McChord Air Force Base) in Washington state plan to fly the first three missions using night-vision goggles (NVGs) and special reflective cones on the runway.
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Flying High
When an international team of scientists lands at McMurdo Station in early August 2010, it will be dark and cold as only an Antarctic winter can be.
And that’s a good thing if you’re interested in learning about what’s happening in the atmosphere above the continent at one of the harshest times of the year.
The mostly French and American researchers will launch as many as 18 long-duration balloons to float in the atmosphere at about 20 kilometers altitude. The “launch pad” will be from a field camp on the sea ice in front of the U.S. Antarctic Program’s biggest research station.
These super-pressure balloons, capable of maintaining a level altitude, will carry a host of different instruments for measuring everything from basic atmospheric properties like temperature and humidity, including their profiles to the ice surface, to the processes involved in ozone depletion over Antarctica.
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Fishy Business
Climate change may be to blame for disappearance of Antarctic silverfish
Adélie penguins across parts of the northwestern Antarctic Peninsula don’t appear to be getting a balanced diet these days.
What’s missing? A sardine-sized fish called Pleuragramma antarcticum, more commonly referred to as the Antarctic silverfish.
Once upon a time, as the story goes, Antarctic silverfish swam by the thousands in places like Arthur Harbor at the northern end of the peninsula.
“That doesn’t happen anymore,” said Joseph Torres , a professor in the College of Marine Science at the University of South Florida .
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Ocean Observations
Palmer LTER scientists call for new strategy to take measurements
Underwater robots and marine animals outfitted with scientific sensors are part of a proposed strategy for monitoring polar oceans into the 21st century, particularly a stretch of sea along the western Antarctic Peninsula, which is undergoing rapid climate changes.
The proposal comes in the June 18, 2010 issue of the journal Science by a group of scientists who conduct research in Antarctica, most of whom currently work on the Palmer Long Term Ecological Research (PAL LTER) program.
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Powerful Reminder
Plaque dedicated to former McMurdo nuclear plant marks significant moment in Antarctic history
Historic interest in the world’s coldest continent often focuses on the so-called Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration or the dawning of the scientific age with the International Geophysical Year (IGY).
Earlier this year, a nearly forgotten footnote in Antarctic history got a permanent page in the record books when officials from the National Science Foundation (NSF) dedicated a bronze plaque commemorating the first and only nuclear power plant to operate on the Ice.
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Antarctic Beachcombing
Scientists seek to reconstruct peninsula ice sheet by dating rocks
Alexander Simms and two graduate students from Oklahoma State University recently returned from the beach — but they don’t have the tans to show for it.
Of course, beachcombing in Antarctica as winter approaches isn’t exactly a holiday experience.
An assistant professor in the Boone Pickens School of Geology at OSU, Simms is the principal investigator on a project trying to reconstruct the history of the ice sheet across the Antarctic Peninsula since it last reached its maximum extent some 20 millennia ago.
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Underwater forests of Antarctica
Scientists dive deep into unlocking mysteries of unique marine ecosystem
There are mighty forests in Antarctica. Just don’t expect to see them poking through the ice and snow.
The forests are underwater, composed of several species of huge brown algae, or seaweed, which blanket the ocean floor on the western side of the Antarctic Peninsula. These macroalgae dominate the local ecosystem in ways no other seaweed does anywhere else in the world.
This unique marine forest — comparable to the great kelp forest off the coast of California in terms of sheer biomass — and the marine organisms that inhabit it has drawn a team of researchers from the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) and University of South Florida (USF) down to the U.S. Antarctic Program’s Palmer Station for more than a decade.
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Killer News
Scientists suggest several new species of orcas, including in the Antarctic
New technology in gene sequencing confirmed what scientists have long suspected about Orcinus orca: The large marine mammal commonly referred to as a killer whale actually represents several genetically distinct species, including at least two new ones that swim in the Southern Ocean around Antarctica.
Scientists analyzed tissue samples from more than 100 killer whales from the North Pacific, the North Atlantic and the Southern Ocean. As a result of the study, published last month in the journal Genome Research, the scientists suggest there are two types of killer whales in the Antarctic and a mammal-eating “transient” killer whale in the North Pacific, in addition to the “standard” black-and-white orca of SeaWorld fame.
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Intersection of art and science
Bledsoe's latest novel about Antarctica explores dynamics between artists and scientists
Antarctica’s raw beauty has been a natural setting for numerous books of fiction and nonfiction over the years. Lucy Jane Bledsoe , a two-time recipient of a grant from the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artist and Writers Program , has been repeatedly drawn back to the icy continent over the last decade.
Bledsoe recently published her fourth book based on her experiences from two trips to Antarctica in 1999-2000 and 2003-04. In the following interview, Bledsoe discusses what attracts her to the continent and how her latest effort, “The Big Bang Symphony: A novel of Antarctica,” is the book that she went to the Ice to write.
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Added protection
Revised ASPA plan for Cape Hallett preserves huge Adélie colony
Kevin Pettway will be the first person to tell you it’s not easy to get to Cape Hallett. But he’ll also tell you the trip is well worth the effort to help protect one of Antarctica’s biological gems.
The journey required the support of a nearby Italian research station, Mario Zucchelli Station, and a couple of extra nights stuck in a “bare bones” tent camp thanks to the continent’s unpredictable weather.
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About the journey
Norbert Wu returns to Antarctica for new film, outreach projects
Norbert Wu stands at the stern of the Zodiac, maneuvering the slow-moving inflatable boat through a thick soup of brash ice. The rubber squeaks against the chunks of ice, while the steel prop on the outboard grinds down the bigger pieces and spits them out into the boat’s wake.
A bulky orange float coat makes his short, stout figure appear even thicker. Wu doesn’t exactly sport a Jacques Cousteau physique, but the stature belies a near-legendary fearlessness that has helped propel him into the upper echelon of natural history photographers and filmmakers over the last 20 years.
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Tuning into Neutrinos
ARIANNA proposes to use radio waves to capture the elusive particles
The Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu once wrote that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.
For a team of physicists hoping to learn more about the high-energy universe, the journey toward building an array of 10,000 instruments for just that purpose began this past season with a single prototype deployed on a 600-meter-thick ice shelf.
“We’re trying to find the sources of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays in the universe,” explained Spencer Klein , leader of the three-person field team that set up the detector in an area called Moore’s Bay, more than 100 kilometers from McMurdo Station . Those galactic cosmic rays — rays being something of a misnomer for the highly charged particles — pack the energy of a well-hit tennis ball in just one particle as it hits the Earth’s upper atmosphere and bursts into a trillion smaller bits.
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Not much bugs Belgica
Antarctic insect focus of new NSF-funded project
Richard Lee stretches his long frame onto the cold, sharp rocks that turn every step on Torgersen Island into a potential ankle-twisting misadventure. His head tilts close to the ground, as if he is about to settle down for a nap, using the dried mat of Prasiola crispa as a pillow. Instead, he carefully flips over the Antarctic green algae to reveal a squirming mass of what appear to be black ants.
They’re insects all right, but no species of ant lives this far south, here on one of the many granite and basalt islets that mark the southern extreme of the Palmer Archipelago off the west coast of the Antarctic Peninsula. These are adult Belgica antarctica, a flightless midge endemic to the continent. The wingless flies are ubiquitous on the islands near Palmer Station , the small U.S. Antarctic Program research base, on Anvers Island.
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Birds of a Feather
Researcher finds special bond — and discoveries — among giant petrels
Donna Patterson-Fraser moves swiftly across the rocks on Humble Island, deftly leaping from stone to stone to avoid damaging the fragile moss that forms a threadbare carpet across the island and between the giant petrel nests along her route.
She and fellow field team member Kirstie Yeager also must weave around the small colonies of Adélie penguins — packed into irregular circles where the ground is stained light pink with guano — and the muddy wallows created by elephant seals. To call their combined smell “pungent” falls far short of the reality. It’s as if everything at a seafood market has turned strongly rancid.
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Long Range Forecast
On the roof of the Space Science and Engineering Center (SSEC) , festooned with antenna that grab data from orbiting satellites in space, Matthew Lazzara gestures to the various dishes, describing the unique history of each one, as if recounting royal lineage.
Two on top of the penthouse date back to the 1970s, he explains. One points to a NOAA satellite that provides imagery over the Antarctic Peninsula. Others receive information from a pair of important Earth-observing satellites launched by NASA, Terra and Aqua .
“A lot of different satellite observations are made available here, which allows us to do some of the work we do,” Lazzara explains before ducking back inside the penthouse of the 15-story building as an October rain drizzle on the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW-Madison) campus turns heavy.
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Dome Deconstruction
It was never supposed to hang around this long. 10 years, maybe 15 at most.
Perhaps that’s why the South Pole Dome — a modestly sized structure spanning 164 feet and topping out at about 52 feet high — has loomed so large in the lore and legacy of polar history.
The final chapter in that story will be completed 35 years after the U.S. Antarctic Program’s most iconic research station was officially dedicated in January 1975. The dome, the second research station built at the geographic South Pole, is coming down.
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Ozone Hole 2009
The size of the annual ozone hole over Antarctica peaked in late September at 23.8 million square miles, slightly smaller than the North American continent, according to a news release from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in November.
That ranks as the 10th largest since satellite measurements began in 1979. Ozone over South Pole Station also reached its thinnest vertical point of the year on Sept. 26, NOAA reported.
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Bounds of Biodiversity
Scientists who normally spend much of the austral summer in the McMurdo Dry Valleys conducting long-term studies on that polar desert ecosystem are taking their research on the road.
Byron Adams , an associate professor of biology at Brigham Young University , will lead a small team of colleagues on a series of short excursions to the Beardmore Glacier in the Transantarctic Mountains this year. The project is something of a reconnaissance mission to determine if viable communities of microorganisms inhabit the exposed soils in a high and dry area dominated by ice.
“We’re really interested about the biodiversity of these organisms that are there, and we’re particularly interested in their evolutionary history as well,” explained Adams, a member of the McMurdo Dry Valleys Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) program, a multidisciplinary study of the lakes and soils in Antarctica’s largest ice-free region.
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Shackleton's Whiskey to be Dug Up
Soon to be unearthed (de-iced?), are two cases of whiskey that were left behind after a hasty departure from Cape Royds during Shackleton's 1908-09 expedition. The cases were found about 3 years ago lodged under the hut and are expected to be cut from the ice this summer by the New Zealand Antarctic Heritage conservation team.
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Long Time Coming
Ernest Shackleton placed perhaps the most famous job wanted ad in history for his 1914 Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, which later earned him so much acclaim for the hardships encountered and overcome.
The advert read: “Men wanted for hazardous journey. Low wages, bitter cold, long hours of complete darkness. Safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in event of success.”
More than 50 years later, when the Antarctic Age of Exploration slipped into the Age of Scientific Discovery, the job ads for forklift drivers or even administrative clerks may not have dripped with such machismo. But there was no less swagger to the attitude that still dominated on the continent when the first female scientists arrived in 1969.
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Rich Layer
Antarctica once enjoyed summer-time temperatures that averaged 10 degrees Celsius — a climate more suited for a warm fleece than a thick parka — about 15.7 million years ago.
That’s the conclusion scientists drew from the discovery of a thick layer of fossils from marine algae and the pollen of woody plants in a sediment core drilled into the seafloor of McMurdo Sound in 2007.
The microscopic fossils were found in unusual abundance in a two-meter-thick layer from the 2007 core of seafloor sediments that measured more than 1,100 meters long.
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Frozen Planet
How do you top what many have called the most popular natural history television program in history?
Set the sequel at the literal ends of the Earth — the Antarctic and Arctic.
BBC and the Discovery Channel have teamed once again on a new documentary series, following closely on the heels of “Planet Earth,” an 11-episode extravaganza shot almost entirely in high-definition (HD) video. Filming on “Frozen Planet” began last year, and a team of filmmakers will head to McMurdo Station and beyond this summer field season with the support of the National Science Foundation (NSF) .
The BBC natural history team chose the polar regions because the original “Planet Earth” episode called “Ice Worlds” seemed to possess the most potential for a series of its own, according to Chadden Hunter , a director who has worked on both wildlife series and has been coordinating the field plan on the Ice.
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Old Ice
The oldest ice core retrieved from Antarctica — and the world — travels back about 850,000 years in time, revealing eight previous ice ages. It took the European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica (EPICA) more than five field seasons to drill down 3,270 meters into the East Antarctic ice sheet.
Andrei Kurbatov and his colleagues believe that they can retrieve a nearly limitless supply of ice for climate research that dates back at least 2.5 million years — located right at the surface and retrievable in a single season.
The proverbial gold mine of old ice is located in a region called the Allan Hills Blue Ice Area, only about an hour’s plane ride away from McMurdo Station , the hub of the U.S. Antarctic Program .
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Rising Up
Scientists Douglas Wilson and Bruce Luyendyk haven’t found the lost continent of Atlantis, but their discovery that far more of West Antarctica may have existed above sea level millions of years ago could help solve one of the great mysteries in the climate history of the continent.
In a paper published in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union, the University of California Santa Barbara researchers suggest that at least twice as much land existed in West Antarctica than today, increasing the total landmass of Antarctica by 10 to 20 percent.
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Off the Radar
Before the high-tech days of weather satellites and the Global Positioning System (GPS), aircraft flying between Christchurch, New Zealand, and McMurdo Station would depend on weather reports and navigational fixes from a weather picket ship deployed near 160° east and 60° south. Both the U.S. Navy and New Zealand (NZ) Navy provided ships for this purpose.
During the years 1957-1968, the U.S. Navy deployed Destroyer Escort (DE) class ships for this duty, while the NZ Navy provided Loch class antisubmarine frigates for the four years it participated. The U.S. ships were World War II vintage DEs, later replaced by DE Radar (DER) class ships. The DERs were also World War II (Edsall class) DEs that were converted for radar duty in the 1950s. Built from 1943 until the end of the war for the princely sum of about $6 million each, the DERs were never intended to be in service into the 1970s.
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South Pole storage
It’s safe to say many visitors and temporary residents at the South Pole Station have sentimental feelings about the Dome that served as the second U.S. research station at 90 degrees south for more than 30 years.
Navy Seabees painstakingly assembled the geodesic structure in the 1970s after it arrived in crates as a “kit” of precut beams and aluminum pieces. For 30 years, a tiny village of moveable buildings sat under its protection, a vast umbrella measuring 164 feet wide and 52 feet high.
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Cradle to Grave
An extinct southern elephant seal colony that once existed in huge numbers along sandy and rocky beaches in Antarctica has provided new insight into how quickly a species can respond to the emergence of a new habitat as climate changes — and just as quickly disappear.
That’s one of the findings in a paper published in the journal PLoS Genetics in July by scientists who studied DNA sequences from the organic remains of seals found along a nearly 300-kilometer stretch of coastline in Victoria Land, just north of the U.S. Antarctic Program’s McMurdo Station .
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Traverse on Track
McMurdo to South Pole. South Pole to AGAP South. Byrd Surface Camp to Pine Island Glacier. WAIS Divide field camp to McMurdo. McMurdo to Willams Ice Stream.
The thousand-mile haul between the U.S. Antarctic Program (USAP) research stations at McMurdo and South Pole is already a reality. The traverse delivered nearly a million pounds of fuel, cargo and equipment to South Pole in 2008-09 — the culmination of nearly a decade of work to establish a safe route across a Texas-sized ice shelf and up a glacier that cuts through the Transantarctic Mountains.
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Sounds of Snow
An Adélie penguin colony can be a cacophonous place, with hundreds of birds braying in an unlikely chorus. That was one of the sounds that Cheryl Leonard wanted to capture, but it wasn’t the most interesting one that she discovered.
Instead, she literally found music at her feet. Or, more accurately, at the feet of the Adélies. The dense stones on Torgersen Island off the Antarctic Peninsula produced melodious sounds — like coins falling together in a pile — when the penguins walked across them.
“Little melodies would come out from their feet as they walked on the stones, kicked the stones, jostled the stones,” says Leonard, a San Francisco-based composer and musician who spent about a month at Palmer Station this past season on an Antarctic Artists and Writers Program grant from the National Science Foundation.
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Midwinter Moment
Shortest day of the year a reason to celebrate in Antarctica
“We are half-way through our long winter. The sun is circling at its lowest; each day will bring it nearer our horizon. The night is at its blackest; each day will lengthen the pale noon twilight. Until now, the black shadow has been descending on us; after this, day by day, it will rise until the great orb looms above our northern horizon to guide our footsteps over the great trackless wastes of snow. If the light-hearted scenes of to-day can end the first period of our captivity, what room for doubt is there that we shall triumphantly weather the whole term with the same general happiness and contentment?” — Capt. Robert Falcon Scott

The words written by Capt. Scott in 1905 describe the sentiment of the men on Scott’s exploration party as they celebrated the midwinter solstice. This same attitude prevails today for all those who spend the winter season in Antarctica.
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Erebus Medals
Americans honored for role in New Zealand air tragedy 30 years ago
Dave Bresnahan was the National Science Foundation (NSF) representative at McMurdo Station on Nov. 28, 1979 when the unthinkable happened.
Air New Zealand Flight 901, an Antarctic sightseeing plane out of Auckland, had lost radio contact at about 1 p.m. Twelve hours later, not long after midnight on Nov. 29, a U.S. Navy plane spotted debris on the lower slopes of Mount Erebus, an active volcano on Ross Island.
Flight 901 had crashed into the side of the volcano and disintegrated. All 257 passengers and crew died, making it the worst national disaster in New Zealand history.
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Dr. Jerri Nielsen FitzGerald
We at the National Science Foundation and U.S. Antarctic Program are saddened to hear the news of the death of Dr. Jerri Nielsen FitzGerald on Tuesday, June 23, 2009.
During her time as the physician at NSF's Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, Dr. FitzGerald was a dedicated member of the station team, and we will always be appreciative of her service to the US Antarctic Program and the scientific mission that continues there.
Dr. FitzGerald's cancer diagnosis while at the station and her subsequent evacuation in October of 1999 made her a public figure through circumstance and not through choice, yet she was able to inspire and educate others diagnosed with the disease and continue practicing medicine. We extend our sympathies to her family, colleagues and community as they mourn her loss.

Byrd History
“Snow melter shoveling is one of the exciting experiences you get at only small inland stations, so consider yourself one of a select group.”— Your Stay at Byrd Station 1970-71
That little excerpt from the 10-page New Byrd Station guide from more than 35 years ago is a light-hearted reminder that life in Antarctica’s vast backyard is far from the comforts of home — or even the relative luxury of McMurdo Station .
At 80° south latitude and 119° west longitude, it’s not a spot on the world map suitable for a family vacation. The Navy personnel charged with establishing the first Byrd Station during 1956-57 for the International Geophysical Year (IGY) at first balked at the idea of heading some 1,000 kilometers by tractor train across the unknown, crevasse-ridden ice of West Antarctica. But they drove the distance — twice in one summer — and built one of the first research stations deep into the interior of the continent.
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Antarctic bird nest?
Discovery of avian fossils suggests Antarctica may have been origin of modern species
Julia Clarke has good reason to believe fossils collected from islands along the Antarctic Peninsula could yield new insights into the evolutionary history of modern birds.
After all, about five years ago, she and her U.S. and Argentine colleagues found proof from a rock specimen, which contained avian vertebrae and pelvic bones among other bits of skeleton, that close relatives of at least one order of modern birds co-existed with dinosaurs.
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SCINI in the Sound
Robot offers new views of marine environment around McMurdo
It seemed unlikely too many marine organisms could make a living under the dark shadow of an ice shelf, with the ice some 200 meters thick in spots.
Why? There are not a lot of places for light to penetrate through the ice, which means not a whole lot of photosynthesis, the driving force behind the food chain, is occurring. Also, the front of the McMurdo Ice Shelf, a distinct part of the Ross Ice Shelf , is about 80 kilometers away and recorded current speeds are less than 2 centimeters per second, so it’s unlikely currents are transporting food for critters to nosh.
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McMurdo Buried
A trio of storms in April blanketed McMurdo Station in Antarctica, breaking a 41-year record for snowfall and coming close to challenging a world record for wind speed.
By May 1, some snow plowing was still ongoing nearly three weeks after the series of snow storms began. More than 6 feet of snow fell between April 11 and April 25.
The first storm began the evening of April 11 and dumped 17.5 inches over four days, including 14 inches in just 24 hours, a new record. The previous record had been 10 inches over a 24-hour period in April 1968, according to Ed Saul, a weather observer working at McMurdo for the winter.
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IPY Traverse
Overland exploration of East Antarctica collects data for last thousand years of climate
The 12 scientists and support staff who made a slow crawl across a vast, blank stretch of East Antarctica this past austral summer for three months to study how regional climate variability relates to global climate change expected to encounter brutally cold storms and other challenges on the high polar plateau.
They didn’t expect to come across other travelers in the relatively unexplored area known as Queen Maud Land. But they did — three times in one day.

“We were astonished because we were supposed to be all alone,” said Ted Scambos , a member of the Norwegian-U.S. science team that crossed a large slice of the Antarctic continent using tracked vehicles pulling sleds. “I don’t know where you can go in order to be on the edge of the Earth anymore.”
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Antarctic Treaty Meeting
Scientists, diplomats and others involved in supporting research in Earth’s polar regions converged in Baltimore, Md., in April for the 32nd Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting to discuss topics ranging from climate change to tourism.
The first such meeting hosted in the United States since 1979, the event marked the 50th anniversary of the signing of the historic international treaty that preserved the continent for peaceful, scientific pursuits.
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Unusual Antarctic Microbes Live Life on a Previously Unsuspected Edge
That descendents of marine creatures appear to have thrived in cold, darkness and lack of air for a million years has implications for the search for life elsewhere in the solar system.
An unmapped reservoir of briny liquid chemically similar to sea water, but buried under an inland Antarctic glacier, appears to support unusual microbial life in a place where cold, darkness and lack of oxygen would previously have led scientists to believe nothing could survive, according to newly published research.
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Starlight, Starbright
After two years analyzing data from the Balloon-borne Large-Aperture Sub-millimeter Telescope (BLAST) project, an international group of astronomers and astrophysicists from the United States, Canada and the U.K. reported in the journal Nature this month that half of the starlight of the universe comes from young, star-forming galaxies several billion light years away.
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IPY Legacies
The International Polar Year (IPY) officially came to an end in March. But the legacy of the two-year campaign to learn more about the world’s polar regions will likely last far into the future.
IPY scientists accomplished a dizzying amount of work in the Antarctic and Arctic — from mapping rugged mountain ranges buried hundreds of meters below the ice cap to making underwater observations below an ice shelf. They crisscrossed Antarctica on ski-equipped airplanes and on tracked vehicles. Ice-strengthened ships carried them to little-visited corners of the Southern Ocean, discovering new species in the frigid waters.
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Shifting Winds
Natural releases of carbon dioxide from the Southern Ocean due to shifting wind patterns could have amplified global warming at the end of the last ice age — and could be repeated as manmade warming proceeds, a new paper in the journal Science suggests.
Many scientists think a change in Earth’s orbit triggered the end of the last ice age and caused the northern part of the planet to warm. This partial climate shift was accompanied by rising levels of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2), ice core records show, which could have intensified the warming around the globe.
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Tagged
Just what does a humpback whale in the Southern Ocean do all day?
Well, eat, that’s for certain. A lot. But how much of the shrimplike krill can one of these baleen whales consume in the frigid waters that surround Antarctica before migrating north for the other half of the year?
It’s a question that a team of scientists, led by Douglas Nowacek from Duke University , will address with some high-tech tagging instruments — and steady hands and sharp eyes — during a science cruise around the Antarctic Peninsula beginning in late April.
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Automated Submarine to Better Understand the Mechanics of Antarctic Ice Sheets
A team of British and American scientists has successfully deployed an autonomous robot submarine on six missions beneath an Antarctic ice shelf using sonar scanners to map the seabed and the underside of the ice as it juts out over the sea.
The research is part of a larger, National Science Foundation-funded project to study the dynamic Pine Island Glacier and to understand how increasing ocean temperatures triggered by a warming climate may affect the melting of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) and global sea-level rise.
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Alps in Antarctica
A U.S.-led international team of scientists has created the first detailed picture of a rugged mountain range buried under more than 4 kilometers of ice in East Antarctica.
The researchers, based in two field camps on the high-altitude polar plateau, used twin-engine light aircraft to conduct an aerogeophysical survey of roughly 2 million square kilometers of the ice sheet, the equivalent of two trips around the globe.
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Past Connections
In 1955, the U.S. Navy sent hundreds of Seabees, the Navy’s construction battalion, to Antarctica to build seven research stations for the impending International Geophysical Year (IGY) . Over the course of the next two years, these men braved primitive conditions to do what no one had ever done before — build functioning facilities with electricity, running water and science labs in locales where the explorers before them had struggled to survive.
Ham radio was the only means of talking to loved ones back home in the era preceding satellite-enabled telephony. For the men who arrived at what is now McMurdo Station in December 1955, and who did not depart until a year or two later, hearing a wife’s voice or son’s laughter was an important morale booster.
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Saving Historic Sites
Climbing a mountain, rappelling down a crevasse, and preserving artifacts from two of the most famous explorers in human history, is not how I would typically describe my summer, but this is exactly what I did during my seven-month journey in Antarctica.
Contracted by the Antarctic Heritage Trust , a non-profit organization based in New Zealand, I worked through the harsh winter months at Scott Base conserving objects from Capt. Robert Falcon Scott and Sir Ernest Shackleton’s expedition bases from 1901 to 1913.
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The Leading Edge
If the global climate change story has a lead protagonist south of the Equator, it’s West Antarctica, a marine-based ice sheet discharging ice into the ocean about as fast as Greenland is in the Arctic.
Scientists generally consider East Antarctica, a much larger and thicker ice sheet, still a minor character in the worldwide warming scenario. But there are signs that even this behemoth may be responding to changing climate — and parts of the ice sheet may be more sensitive than first believed.
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2008 South Pole Weather Summary
For you weather buffs out there...this may be of interest...montly detail of recorded temperatures, winds and any records broken for the month.
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Challenging Orthodoxy
A team of scientists working around Byrd Glacier in Antarctica this season may shake up scientific orthodoxy about the formation of the continent’s tallest and longest mountain range.
The researchers, led by Audrey Huerta , an assistant professor at Central Washington University’s Department of Geological Sciences , believe the Transantarctic Mountains are the remnant of an ancient plateau.
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The Shadow Knows
The story goes something like this: Last year, Haste encouraged two of her students, Samir Farmer and Shelby Cluff, to do a science fair project that would measure the shadow cast by a stick as the seasons waxed and waned. The questions the students wanted to answer: Does the shadow really grow shorter in the summer and longer in the winter?
To help answer the former, they enlisted the help of U.S. Antarctic Program personnel at Palmer and South Pole stations.
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Dropping off supplies
Team McChord Airmen assigned to the Expeditionary Airlift Squadron (EAS) in support of Operation Deep Freeze (ODF) has completed four operational C-17 Globemaster III airdrops to the Antarctic Gamburtsev Mountain Province since last month.
Thirty bundles of fuel and other supplies were first delivered to a scientific camp Nov. 26 in the province, one of the most remote locations on Earth.
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Going on a Diet
Penguins' primary prey reveals drastic changes in climate
There’s an old saying: You are what you eat. But the krill-based diet of penguins breeding and living on King George Island off the northern end of the Antarctic Peninsula first tipped scientists off that food could provide an altogether different insight.
“It was the penguins that actually keyed us into to the global change scenario that has become the leading hypothesis about climate change in the peninsula region,” explained Wayne Trivelpiece.
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Going with the Flow
Researchers brave Drake Passage to map world's largest ocean current
Most people who cross Drake Passage by ship are eager for the two-day journey to be over as quickly as possible. The ocean passage splitting the tips of South America and the Antarctic Peninsula is infamously rough, turning even hardened seafarers green around the gills.
But a team of oceanographers will spend more than three weeks in the Drake in November and December to learn more about the world’s largest ocean current, the Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC) . Drake Passage, the chokepoint where the current narrows, is the ideal place to study the ACC, according to Teresa Chereskin a principal investigator for the project and chief scientist for the cruise aboard the RVIB Nathaniel B. Palmer.
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Tourism Influx
These days the South Pole is home to a new U.S. research station — officially called Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station — the third to occupy the spot since 1957. More than 250 people labor there each austral summer, supporting and conducting a dizzying array of scientific research, much of it devoted to astrophysics and unraveling the mysteries of the universe thanks to an environment conducive to such experiments.
But scientists aren’t the only ones attracted to the Pole. A handful of tourists venture south each year, and the number, while modest, has quadrupled in the last five years. The number has climbed steadily from 40 during the 2003-04 season to 164 (which includes repeated visits by pilots) last year, according to statistics kept by South Pole Station Support Supervisor Beth Watson.
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Ice Rescue
A complicated international air operation coordinated by the U.S. Antarctic Program (USAP) , which is managed by the National Science Foundation (NSF) , has successfully evacuated a badly injured employee of the Australian Antarctic Division (AAD) from Antarctica to a hospital in Hobart, Tasmania.
The patient suffered multiple fractures during an all-terrain vehicle accident , while on a field trip at Trajer Ridge, around 25 kilometers from Davis Station, where he had spent almost the past 12 months as the station's chef.
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Lost Fossils
The bottom of McMurdo Sound is teeming with life — from brittle stars to scallops to wildly diverse single-celled critters called foraminifera, many of which build hard body parts or shells out of calcium carbonate.
That’s the story today. But what happened in the ocean millions of years ago? That’s a hard question to answer. For some reason, there are few signs of these critters in the fossil records that geologists and other scientists study in sediment cores taken from below the seafloor.
“It’s almost like a disconnect from the life of today with the life of the past,” observed Molly Miller, a geology professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Vanderbilt University and one of the project’s principal investigators for the National Science Foundation -funded study.
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The loss of Martin Pomerantz
Martin A. Pomerantz (December 17, 1916 - October 25, 2008) was an American physicist who served as Director of the Bartol Research Institute and who had been a leader in developing Antarctic astronomy.When the astronomical observatory at the United States Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station was opened in 1995, it was named the Martin A. Pomerantz Observatory (MAPO) in his honor. Pomerantz published his scientific autobiography, Astronomy on Ice, in 2004
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U.S.-Led, International AGAP Team Poised to Probe One of Antarctica's Last Unexplored Places
A U.S.-led, multinational team of scientists from six nations will pierce the mysteries of one of the globe's last major unexplored places this month. Using sophisticated airborne radar and other Information Age tools and techniques, the scientists will virtually "peel away" more than four kilometers (2.5 miles) of ice covering an Antarctic mountain range that rivals the Alps in elevation, and which current scientific knowledge suggests shouldn't be there at all.
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House Call
Konrad Steffen is one of the world’s leading experts on climate change in Greenland, having traveled to the ice-covered island every year since 1990. He oversees a network of 22 weather stations that collect data about the ice sheet, and returns with his graduate students each year to the same field camp north of the Arctic Circle to study how the ice sheet and its glaciers are responding to a warming climate.
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