Antarctica

Firefly Aerospace launches the "Message in a Booster" mission on its Alpha rocket on April 29, 2025 from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. The flight ended in failure after Alpha suffered an anomaly. (Image credit: Firefly Aerospace/Sean Parker) The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has cleared Firefly Aerospace to…

Johnny Diaz New York Times · 8 Sep, 2025 02:01 AM 4 mins to read Ethan Guo aimed to fly solo to all seven continents but hit legal trouble in Chile when he landed on an island off Antarctica. Photo / iStock Ethan Guo aimed to fly solo to all…

PUNTA ARENAS, Chile — An American social media influencer who has been stuck in a Chilean airbase in Antarctica for two months after landing a plane there without permission was released Saturday back to the mainland, where he was to pay $30,000 in penalties. Ethan Guo, who was 19 when…

Grasslands go by many names. In the Midwest region of the United States they’re often called prairies. In South America, they’re known as pampas. Central Eurasian grasslands are referred to as steppes, while African grasslands are savannas. What they all have in common are grasses, their naturally dominant vegetation. Grasslands…

When we think of the creatures that call Antarctica home, emperor penguins, seals, and orcas may be the first few animals to cross our minds. However, as a Chicago-sized iceberg broke away from the George VI Ice Shelf early in January 2025, researchers found the area teeming with life. The…

Nearly 40 years after breaking away from the Filchner – Ronne Ice Shelf in Antarctica, the A23a iceberg is finally beginning to melt and merge into the ocean for good. A23a ranks among the oldest and largest icebergs ever recorded and remains the biggest block of frozen freshwater on the...Read…

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Long-term studies help scientists understand how species and ecosystems change, adapt, or struggle. With today’s fast-paced global shifts and growing environmental threats, this kind of monitoring is more important than ever. Antarctica is changing fast, and that’s a big deal for the plants and animals specially built to survive its…

Seen from space, Antarctica looks so much simpler than the other continents — a great sheet of ice set in contrast to the dark waters of the encircling Southern Ocean. Get closer, though, and you’ll find not a simple cap of frozen water, but an extraordinarily complex interplay between the…

Antarctica has long been seen as a remote, unchanging environment. Not any more. The ice-covered continent and the surrounding Southern Ocean are undergoing abrupt and alarming changes. Sea ice is shrinking rapidly, the floating glaciers known as ice shelves are melting faster, the ice sheets carpeting the continent are approaching…