Antarctica

Researchers have found meteoritic spherules on top of Walnumfjellet in the Sør Rondane Mountains, Antarctica. The breakup of a giant asteroid in the main asteroid belt. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech. “Remnants of hypervelocity impacts on Earth’s surface are mainly preserved as impact craters, generally circular depressions resulting from asteroids…

Artist’s interpretation of the hot jet of molten particles and hot gas, striking the ancient Antarctic surface. Image: Mark A. GarlickAsteroids that smash directly into Earth’s surface can cause extensive damage, but, as new evidence uncovered in east Antarctica suggests, asteroids that explode on entry can be equally devastating. Super…

An image shared on Facebook purportedly shows a military camp built on top of a “giant tree stump” in Antarctica. Facebook/Screenshot Verdict: False The image shows a South African research facility on an Antarctic nunatak, a rocky mountainous outcropping that protrudes from the snow. Fact Check: In the image, several…

Home News Sea anemones and filter feeders cling to the rocks hundreds of feet below the Brunt Ice Shelf in Antarctica, where a gargantuan iceberg just broke free. (Image credit: Courtesy the Alfred Wegener Institute) About two weeks ago, an iceberg large enough to hold New York City nearly two…

Circle of Confusion Television Studios and Big Talk Productions are teaming on an expansive and epic series adaptation of award-winning author Paul McAuley’s acclaimed science fiction novel “Austral”. The story is set in Antarctica during the year 2098, decades after the melting glaciers have given way to a new frontier…

Antarctica’s northern George VI Ice Shelf experienced record melting during the 2019-2020 summer season compared with 31 previous summers of dramatically lower melt, a University of Colorado Boulder-led study found. The extreme melt coincided with record-setting stretches when local surface air temperatures were at or above the freezing point. According…

Home News An photograph shows the surface portion of the IceCube Neutrino Observatory. (Image credit: Martin Wolf/IceCube/NSF) The most remote particle detector on Earth has detected the most energetic antimatter particle ever: a single ultralight particle that smacked into the Antarctic ice with the (relatively) thundering energy of 6,300 flying…

In 1813, the East India Company’s James Forbes published an explosive story about monkeys. While traveling in India, he had stayed beneath an enormous banyan tree near the Narmada River. One day, a friend of his shot a langur monkey out of the tree, then took its body into a…

Women on board the Homeward Bound expedition in 2016. Photo / Supplied When 76 women scientists boarded a ship to Antarctica in the hopes of completing a transformative course on leadership, the last thing they expected was for one of them to later go public with allegations of rape. Even…

Up until recently, scientists thought that life couldn’t exist far beneath parts of Antarctica’s ice shelf. That assumption has been flipped on its head with the recent discovery of sponges in an area 260 kilometers (161 miles) inside the outer edge of an Antarctic ice shelf. According to a paper…