Antarctica

The U.S. National Science Foundation announced today it awarded KBR Services LLC (KBR) the Antarctic Science and Engineering Support Contract to provide planning, management and execution support for the U.S. Antarctic Program (USAP).  The Indefinite-Delivery/Indefinite-Quantity contract is scheduled to begin June 2, 2026 with a 20-year period of performance and a ceiling…

Antarctica’s vast ice sheet may have crossed a hidden climate threshold about one million years ago, fundamentally changing how it responds to shifts in Earth’s climate. Credit: Shutterstock Scientists discovered that Antarctica’s ice sheet became dramatically more climate-sensitive after crossing a critical threshold one million years ago. A new study…

Intraplate intermediate-depth earthquakes (IDEs) occur at depths >70 kilometers, which is well below the brittle‒ductile transition in Earth’s crust, and their origins are difficult to reconcile with traditional plate tectonics. We applied a deep...Read More

A helicopter lands at an ice core drilling site in Antarctica. Credit: Bradley Markle/CU Boulder A decade ago, Bradley Markle, an assistant professor at the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research at the University of Colorado Boulder, noticed an odd pattern while sifting through temperature records from the end of…

A vital ice shelf is about to break away from Antarctica's "Doomsday Glacier," further destabilizing one of the world's largest and most vulnerable glaciers. The Thwaites Glacier is nicknamed the "Doomsday Glacier" because its collapse would send so much ice into the Southern Ocean that global sea levels would rise…

Hektoria Glacier, October 2022. Credit: NASA Earth Observatory images by Lauren Dauphin, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. The rapid loss of Hektoria Glacier’s grounded ice is visible in these images acquired in October 2022 (upper) and March 2024 (lower) with the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat…

Antarctica's sea ice started shrinking dramatically in 2015 after resisting global warming for decades, and researchers now know why. A study published May 8 in the journal Science Advances reveals that Antarctic sea ice succumbed to strong winds that disturbed the Southern Ocean's layers, replacing cold and relatively fresh surface…

QUICK FACTS Name: Don Juan Pond Location: McMurdo Dry Valleys, Antarctica Coordinates: -77.5625, 161.1915 Why it's incredible: The lake's high salinity keeps it from freezing even in subzero temperatures. Don Juan Pond is a lake in Antarctica's extremely cold McMurdo Dry Valleys region that has a salinity above 40%, making…

Scientists have uncovered a hidden process beneath Antarctica that could make future sea level rise much worse than expected. Credit: Shutterstock Hidden warm-water traps beneath Antarctica may be melting the continent’s ice far faster than scientists realized. Global sea levels could rise faster than scientists once predicted, according to new…

One of the most striking images in David Attenborough’s Ocean, his defining 2025 documentary, is of supertrawlers dragging vast krill nets through a pod of feeding humpback whales off Antarctica. For most viewers, it will have been the moment a distant and invisible crisis became viscerally real...Read More