The Lithuanian World Alpine Ski Association is undertaking an expedition to Antarctica in the name of Lithuanian prestige. The team has left Cape Horn in Argentina and is en route through Drake’s Passage to Antarctica with an ice breaker. Once there they will commemorate Lithuanian independence on March 11. There will also be a ski […]
The vast ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica are melting faster than previously estimated and that melting is accelerating, according to a new report that verifies 18 years of melting via two independent techniques. The most thorough data set, from 1992 through the present, employed satellite radar readings of ice movement, soundings of ice thickness, […]
Several sled teams and skiers are planning expeditions to the South Pole to celebrate the 1911-12 race that was won by the Norwegian Roald Amundsen, and cost the lives of the Robert Scott’s British expedition. ”It’s still quite on the edge of most Australians’ consciousness and something like this journey can bring it much closer.” […]
“That ice sheets will dominate future sea level rise is not surprising — they hold a lot more ice mass than mountain glaciers,” said lead author Eric Rignot, jointly of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., and the University of California, Irvine. Over the length of the study, the ice caps have lost an average […]
“Who knew that a buried mountain range would let you grow the ice sheet from underneath?” Bell said that “the important message” is that while ice experts have long known of underground water systems “greasing the bottom of ice sheets,” and thus potentially undermining them, “we never considered that they might be important for the […]
Ships from the environmental activist group Sea Shepherd have been searched by police after docking in Australia. The searches were part of an investigation by Australian Federal Police after complaints from the Japanese government. Sea Shepherd, which opposes Japanese whaling in the Southern Ocean, said it was not the first time it has been investigated […]
British scientists suspect climate change is to blame for the disappearance of a colony of Emperor penguins in Antarctica. A colony of Antarctica’s iconic Emperor penguins has completely disappeared from their island namesake, according to British scientists. According to the researchers, the decline relates closely to a rise in local air temperature and changes in […]
Next year, 2012, marks the 100th anniversary of Robert Scott and his team’s expedition to the South Pole. The International Scott Centenary Expedition (ISCE) plans to mark the occasion with a memorial for the lost men in Antarctica. This expedition will be joined by descendants of the men of the original expedition. The Telegraph is […]
# “Pym” is outrageously entertaining, a book that brilliantly re-imagines and extends Edgar Allan Poe’s enigmatic and unsettling “Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket.” # Eventually, Pym and his “half-breed” companion, Dirk Peters, flee Tsalal in a small boat and find themselves drawn ever southward, as if by a magnet, into a world of […]
The meteorite was discovered in 1995, and a powder sample reveals that the meteorite contains nitrogen, the same element found in proteins and DNA that originate life. The same asteroid contained organic molecules, which also could have contributed to life on earth. Based on this finding, researchers published a revealing report in the journal Proceedings […]