Antarctica

In Antarctica’s extreme cold, plants blanket small ice-free areas in bursts of green. These include two native species of flowering plants, 116 moss species, and several liverworts and lichens. Until now, however, none had been assessed for their extinction risk in Antarctica. For the first time...Read More

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During peak tourism season, some places are unrecognizable. In the Italian cliffside town of Positano, visitors trudge shoulder-to-shoulder through narrow streets. In Viña del Mar, Chile, every inch of the beach is claimed by an umbrella. And at Yosemite National Park, gridlocked traffic stops many would-be visitors from entering the…

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This week, as governments of various coastal states gather in Mombasa, Kenya, for the Our Ocean Conference, Africa must demand an end to industrial krill fishing in the Southern Ocean before irreversible damage is done to Antarctica and the ocean systems upon which our continent depends...Read More

A colossal chunk of sea ice roughly the size of Texas is missing from the west coast of Antarctica, and scientists fear it might never form again. Antarctica is currently in winter, which runs from March to October on the southernmost continent. During the winter months, floating sea ice surrounding…

There’s a vast hidden structure buried deep beneath Antarctica. It’s not the ruins of a lost ancient civilization, though; it’s a nearly continent-sized network of hidden basins two miles beneath the surface.  An international team of geoscientists discovered the superstructure by combining observations from a variety of sources, including gravity…

The out-of-Africa migration, in which ancient humans went on to inhabit every other continent except Antarctica, may not have been one moment in time, but a long and slow process. Columnist Michael Marshall examines how archaeologists are rethinking this critical part of our history...Read More

By combining seismic, gravity and topographic data, a team of researchers from Italy, Switzerland, Germany and the United Kingdom found that several well-known subglacial basins in East Antarctica are part of a single fan-shaped province whose origins trace back to ancient continental stretching. Fault-controlled basins and interpreted structural frame in…

Antarctic bedrock is mostly hidden by the Antarctic Ice Sheet, which covers over 99% of the continent. Recent investigations into the sub-ice topography have captured, with much better detail, a series of low-elevation V-shaped basins that lie beneath a large area of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet. Deep under the…