Antarctica

Climate models have long predicted that global warming would weaken the Southern Ocean's ability to absorb carbon dioxide (CO2). Yet decades of measurements show little sign of this decline. Scientists from the Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI) have now uncovered a likely reason for the surprising stability. Their findings suggest that…

In the early afternoon of Dec. 14, 1911, Roald Amundsen and his crew of four officially became the first men to reach the geographic South Pole. To get there, the Norwegian explorers navigated the interminable snowfields of interior Antarctica, trudging through the harshest climates on earth for 56 days. They…

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The largest herds of caribou in the world make their homes here. Polar bears give birth to cubs in dens dug into this soil, some of them more than 200 years old. And birds like the Arctic tern fly north every summer, some from as far south as Antarctica, to…

As recently as the 1990s, when the Greenland Ice Sheet and the rest of the Arctic region were measurably thawing under the climatic blowtorch of human-caused global warming, most of Antarctica’s vast ice cap still seemed securely frozen. But not anymore. Physics is physics. As the planet heats up, more…

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Asteroid 2025 TF passed over Antarctica at 00:47:26 UTC ± 18 seconds on October 1, coming within 428 ± 7 km of Earth's surface. That distance is nearly the same as the orbit of the International Space Station (approx. 370 -- 460 km). Measuring about 1 to 3 meters in…

One week ago, an asteroid flew so close to Earth that it nearly broke the record for the closest asteroid approach ever. This space surprise came to astronomers’ attention on Wednesday, October 1, 2025, when the Catalina Sky Survey in Arizona spotted an asteroid named 2025 TF a few hours…

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Ernest Shackleton's ship Endurance wasn't reinforced for navigating Antarctic ice, a new study suggests. Shackleton was aware of the ship's shortcomings. (Image credit: IanDagnall Computing via Alamy) The infamous ship Endurance, which sank in Antarctica in 1915, wasn't as well built for a polar voyage as previously thought — and…