Antarctica

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…

Researchers have identified a massive hidden geological feature beneath the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, revealing a previously unrecognized connection between some of the continent's largest buried landscapes. The newly recognized structure consists of a network of enormous basins concealed beneath ice that exceeds three kilometers (nearly two miles) in thickness…

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