A Single Boulder
A lone granite boulder found against all odds high atop a glacier in Antarctica may provide additional key evidence to support a theory that parts of the southernmost continent once were connected to North America hundreds of millions of years ago.
Previous lines of scientific evidence led researchers to theorise that about 600-800 million years ago a portion of Rodinia broke away from what is now the southwestern United States and eventually drifted southward to become eastern Antarctica and Australia.
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Dusting Up
It’s strangely dusty in the polar regions, if you know where to look. For more than three decades, Ellen Mosley-Thompson has followed the dusty trail through ice cores taken from Antarctica and Greenland, learning much about the past climate of the planet — and possibly something of its future.
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Penguins setting off sirens over health of world's oceans
Like the proverbial canary in the coal mine, penguins are sounding the alarm for potentially catastrophic changes in the world's oceans, and the culprit isn't only climate change, says a University of Washington conservation biologist.
Oil pollution, depletion of fisheries and rampant coastline development that threatens breeding habitat for many penguin species, along with Earth's warming climate, are leading to rapid population declines among penguins, said Dee Boersma, a University of Washington biology professor and an authority on the flightless birds.
"Penguins are among those species that show us that we are making fundamental changes to our world," she said. "The fate of all species is to go extinct, but there are some species that go extinct before their time and we are facing that possibility with some penguins."
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Earthshaking Discovery
Douglas Wiens, a professor of earth and planetary sciences at Washington University in St. Louis External Non-U.S. government site, and colleagues combined seismological and GPS data to reveal that an ice stream in West Antarctica releases two bursts of seismic waves every day, each one equivalent to a magnitude 7 earthquake.
Although this study was restricted to a single ice stream, the new findings document behavior that runs counter to how scientists generally have perceived glacial motion, according to Wiens.
“Glaciologists model the flow of glaciers using the assumption that it’s basically a kind of creeping … motion. But recently we’ve been seeing seismic signals coming from a number of ice streams and glaciers, and no one’s been able to interpret them,” said Wiens, who led the research team.
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Winter No Relief
Not even the Antarctic winter can save the Wilkins Ice Shelf.
The European Space Agency reported earlier this month that the ice shelf is continuing to deteriorate over the austral winter, with an area of about 160 square kilometers breaking off from May 30 to 31. ESA’s Envisat satellite captured the event — the first ever-documented episode to occur in winter.
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Moving Experience
POLENET will monitor bedrock beneath ice sheets to learn more about post-glacial rebound
Terry Wilson’s office at Ohio State University seems pretty typical of a college professor, especially one who splits her time teaching the fundamentals of geology to undergraduates while managing one of the largest and most ambitious projects of the International Polar Year (IPY).
Stacks of papers sit in relatively neat piles on the floor, leaving just enough of an aisle to maneuver in and out of the office. Various filing cabinet drawers are pulled out to their maximum extent, revealing cramped and stuffed folders. The sheer weight of the paperwork seems enough to cause a dimple in the earth that supports her office.
Should that material suddenly blow away, vanish in a freak windstorm, the ground underneath would eventually rebound to its original state, slowly sighing in relief as the burden of weight goes away.
In Antarctica, where the weight of its mighty ice sheets have squashed the earth’s crust below, Wilson and an international team of scientists are studying a real phenomenon called post-glacial rebound. The work is part of an ambitious project, called POLENET, for Polar Earth Observing Network.
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Persistent Chemical
More than three decades after much of the world banned or restricted its use, the pesticide known as DDT is still showing up at consistent levels in the tissue of Adélie penguins in Antarctica.
That’s the finding recently published online in the journal Environmental Science & Technology by scientists studying ecosystem processes and climate change in the Antarctic Peninsula. They concluded that because most countries have banned or severely restricted DDT use since the 1970s, the source of the insecticide is most likely glacial meltwater.
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Preserving Pole's past
Visitors to the newly constructed, elevated station at the South Pole will surely marvel at the sheer magnitude of materials and manpower it took to erect one of the world’s most high-tech, scientific research facilities in the middle of Nowhere, Antarctica.
But today’s South Pole is only the latest incarnation in a steady stream of historical watersheds. Countless reminders of past glories sit in glass displays and hang from the walls of those spotless hallways, witness to 50 years of habitation and human drama.
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The Hotspot
In 2005, scientists aboard the ARSV Laurence M. Gould went on what pelagic biologist Bruce Robison said some in the scientific community characterized as a quixotic quest to prove icebergs are a hotspot for life in the deep ocean.
The team of geochemists, oceanographers, biologists and others indeed found a host of animals and organisms above, below and on the icebergs, including seabirds, phytoplankton and shrimp-like krill. But they also believe these floating chunks of ice may play a significant role in removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere thanks to the associated biological community.
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Below the Surface
Oscar Schofield pauses the phone conversation for a moment, as he pulls up a Web page that tracks the location of two underwater gliders operated by Rutgers University’s Coastal Ocean Observation Lab.
He reports to his caller that one of the sleek robots has covered more than 2,000 kilometers since it left the New Jersey coast on March 7. It has made some 1,500 profiles of the water column, as it slowly bobs up and down in a sawtooth pattern below the surface, measuring physical ocean properties like salinity and temperature.
An associate professor at Rutgers whose research interests focus on phytoplankton, Schofield envisions a small fleet of these autonomous robots, known as Slocum gliders, swimming and prowling the cold waters off the Antarctic Peninsula to collect information about the rapidly changing marine ecosystem there.
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Deep Time
Just 500 kilometers from the South Pole, on a warm day, you might seek shelter from the sun in a temperate forest, one that would appear somewhat familiar yet perhaps a little strange, with oddities like long-trunked trees sporting fern-like leaves.
You would just have to go back in time by about 200 to 250 million years for such a pleasant, surreal stroll.
It’s in this deep geologic timeframe that Edith L. Taylor, a paleobotanist at the University of Kansas, seeks answers to how flowering seed plants, the dominate flora species today, evolved over time.
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Going Beyond the Movies
Elementary school teachers browsing the Internet for classroom inspiration on topics about Antarctica have a dizzying amount of material available. A popular Web search engine will pull up more than 39 million results. The Arctic is apparently even more popular, with some 58 million possible choices and counting.
Where to start? Whom to trust? And how to fit polar science topics into an already crowded curriculum?
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Breaking Up
The spectacular disintegration of a large chunk of the Wilkins Ice Shelf off the Antarctic Peninsula last month may be part of an accelerating pattern of climate change in the region.
That’s the conclusion that scientists are drawing after more than 400 square kilometers of ice sloughed off the southwestern front of the ice shelf. A series of satellite images processed at the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) in Boulder, Colo., showed the edge of the shelf crumbling and disintegrating in a pattern that has become characteristic of climate-caused ice shelf retreats throughout the northern Peninsula area, according to NSIDC scientists.
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Life in the Cold and Dark
Alison Murray studies tiny critters with a potentially big role in the marine ecosystem of the Southern Ocean surrounding Antarctica.
Murray is interested in how bacterioplankton, the bacterial component of plankton communities, make their living in the Antarctic winter waters, when the long austral night presumably shuts down or slows many biological processes that rely on solar energy.
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A Year in the Life
The short film opens with the moon streaking behind the dome-shaped top of Mount Discovery, as twilight briefly splashes red on the face of the volcanic cone. In the subsequent scene, the moon appears again, dramatically flying past a wooden cross on Observation Hill overlooking McMurdo Station.
Next, come the auroras: shimmering green sheets of light, soft and ephemeral, then almost solid and powerful, curtains billowing in a cosmic wind. Violin music plays softly, achingly, and then suddenly an entire orchestra rushes in as the southern lights blaze across the night sky in a quick succession of scenes.
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The Score on Sea Ice
Antarctic sea ice remains relatively healthy while the sea ice in the Arctic continues a precipitous decline in overall volume.
That’s the latest state of the union report from NASA, which held a teleconference for the media, with three scientists presenting the latest analysis from satellite data. NASA satellite records on sea ice extent go back about 40 years.
“The area of Antarctic ice has been relatively stable in the past 35 years,” said Seelye Martin, program manager of Cryospheric Sciences in the Earth Science Division at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C.
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Getting warmer
Soon we may have to call it the Subantarctic Peninsula.
Scientists who monitor the ecosystem at the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula say a warmer, moist climate has migrated into their research area, virtually eliminating perennial sea ice there and driving the local Adélie penguin population to the brink of extinction.
“Our prediction now is that within the next five to 10 years there will not be any Adélies left at Palmer of any consequence,” said Bill Fraser, one of the principal investigators studying the ecosystem near Palmer Station, a U.S. research station located on Anvers Island off the coast of the peninsula.
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Practically Home
Somewhere not too far from the U.S. Antarctic Program’s largest field camp on the West Antarctic ice sheet sits Charles Bentley’s record collection of chamber music, entombed in the ice with the rest of Byrd Station.
One of the first research outposts established by the United States during the International Geophysical Year (IGY) in the late 1950s, Byrd Station still holds fond memories for Bentley, who spent two Antarctic winters there beginning in 1957.
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Special Areas
Management plans for ASPA sites tightened for upcoming review by Treaty nations.
Antarctica has come to symbolize one of the last, great frontiers for science — a pristine, natural laboratory for oceanography, glaciology, biology, astrophysics and a host of other research endeavors.
Keeping the continent neat and tidy — unsullied from pollution and degradation from human activities as much as possible — is one of the chief goals of the nations that operate on its ice sheets, in biologically and geologically diverse areas, and near its shores.
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Halfway Done
Construction of the world’s largest, and perhaps most unique, telescope is 50 percent complete.
Drillers deployed the 18th string of digital sensors for the IceCube Neutrino Observatory array on Jan. 25, 2008. That means there are now 40 strings of digital optical modules (called DOMs) buried up to 2,500 meters into the ice around the South Pole.
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Plumbing Erebus
Researchers spent more than three months installing an array of seismometers around Mount Erebus to listen to waves of energy generated by small, controlled blasts from explosives they buried along its flanks and perimeter. Seismometers measure and record the size and force of underground energy, or seismic, waves.
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Taking Shelter
A new building joined the McMurdo Station cityscape this past austral summer. It took less than an hour to erect.
Quick deployment is one of the key components that NASA is after for a space habitat that will shelter astronauts on long-term missions to the moon and beyond to Mars. One leading concept is an inflatable building.
A team from NASA brought a terrestrial version of the structure to McMurdo in January to test a number of variables, including its resiliency in the tough Antarctic environment. NASA scientists and engineers often use Antarctica as a testing ground for such projects, as the continent serves as an easy and inexpensive substitute for the real rigors of outer space.
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New Antarctic Ice Core to Provide Clearest Climate Record Yet
After enduring months on the coldest, driest and windiest continent on Earth, researchers closed out the inaugural season on an unprecedented, multi-year effort to retrieve the most detailed record of greenhouse gases in Earth's atmosphere over the last 100,000 years.
Working as part of the National Science Foundation's West Antarctic Ice Sheet Divide (WAIS Divide) Ice Core Project, a team of scientists, engineers, technicians and students from multiple U.S. institutions have recovered a 580-meter (1,900-foot) ice core--the first section of what is hoped to be a 3,465-meter (11,360-foot) column of ice detailing 100,000 years of Earth's climate history, including a precise year-by-year record of the last 40,000 years.
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Phone Home
Mike Comberiate is a man who doesn’t lose count. Maybe it’s a quirk of being a NASA “rocket scientist” with the Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC).
In rapid-fire dialogue, Comberiate proudly notes this current trip to Antarctica marks his 99th project here on an ongoing program dubbed COOLSPACE — Communications Over Obscure Locations Special Purpose Advanced Communications Equipment.
Distill that long title and you learn that Comberiate and his colleagues determine how to communicate between points A and B. The problem could be linking a phone call between the north and south poles — or crossing outer space from Earth to speak to robots exploring the surface of Mars.
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Sir Ed passes away
Sir Edmund Hillary, New Zealand’s favorite and most famous son, died Jan. 11 (local time) at the age of 88 in an Auckland hospital.
Hillary, more popularly referred to as Sir Ed, rose to fame in 1953 as the first man to summit Mount Everest, along with Sherpa Tenzing Norgay. But the former beekeeper also left his mark in the Antarctic, helping to establish New Zealand’s Scott Base on Ross Island in 1957 and leading the first overland vehicle traverse to the South Pole in 1958.
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NSF Dedicates New South Pole Station
The United States has dedicated a new scientific station at the geographic South Pole--the third since 1957--officially ushering in a new support system for sophisticated large-scale experiments in disciplines ranging from astrophysics to environmental chemistry and seismology.
The dedication of the new Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, which took place on Sat., Jan. 12, local time (U.S. stations in Antarctica keep New Zealand time), also reasserts the National Science Foundation's (NSF) vital role in managing the U.S. Antarctic Program in order to meet the needs of the U.S. research community as well as those of other federal agencies.
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Scientific Balloons Achieve Antarctic Flight Record
The National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) have jointly achieved a new milestone in the almost 20-year history of scientific ballooning in Antarctica, by launching and operating three long-duration sub-orbital flights within a single Southern-Hemisphere summer.
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