Antarctica

Home News Science & Astronomy Changes in the ice surface of the Amery Ice Shelf in Antarctica reveal the rapid draining of a lake deep below in 2019. (Image credit: NASA Earth Observatory) Scientists have discovered two new lakes buried deep beneath the Antarctic Ice Sheet.  These hidden gems of…

Home News Changes in the ice surface of the Amery Ice Shelf in Antarctica reveal the rapid draining of a lake deep below in 2019. (Image credit: NASA Earth Observatory) Scientists have discovered two new lakes buried deep beneath the Antarctic Ice Sheet.  These hidden gems of frigid water are…

Home News The field location including the tents and labs set up at Subglacial Lake Whillans, in Antarctica. (Image credit: John Priscu/University of Bristol) Microbes living in an ice-covered lake in Antarctica are feasting on crushed rocks, researchers have discovered. And the little critters are thriving.  Subglacial lakes are bodies…

When environmental physicist Kira Rehfeld, from Heidelberg University, visited Antarctica for her research, she was struck by the intense light there. "It's always light in summer. This solar radiation could actually be used to supply the research infrastructure with energy," she observes. However, generators, engines, and heaters in these remote…

Ed Sheeran wanted to ensure his daughter wouldn't have a common name by choosing the unique moniker Lyra Antarctica. The Shape of You star and his wife, Cherry Seaborn, welcomed their first child last summer, and Ed didn't want their little girl growing up with multiple namesakes in school, as…

The United Nations on Thursday recognised a new record high temperature for the Antarctic continent, confirming a reading of 18.3 degrees Celsius (64.9 degrees Fahrenheit) made last year. The record heat was reached at Argentina’s Esperanza research station on the Antarctic Peninsula on February 6, 2020, the UN’s World Meteorological…

Joyride, a Toronto-based company that provides white label apps, back-end analytics and multimodal fleet management for shared micromobility startups, has raised $3.7 million — seed money that it says will help it reach a greater number of small, local operators.  The company, which operates in more than 160 markets in…

Cliff collapseTall ice cliffs at the edges of ice sheets can collapse under their own weight in spectacular fashion, a process that can considerably hasten ice sheet mass loss. Bassis et al. used a dynamic ice model to demonstrate that this kind of collapse can be slowed either by upstream…

Home News Gentoo and chinstrap penguins hang out on an iceberg Western Antarctic. (Image credit: Steven Kazlowski / Barcroft Media / Getty Images)) The first humans to discover Antarctica weren't seafaring Westerners but rather Polynesians, who found the coldest continent 1,300 years ago, a new study suggests. Researchers in New…

Antarctica’s monster Pine Island Glacier—one of the fastest melting glaciers on the continent—is giving climate scientists new reasons to worry. The trouble has to do with its ice shelf, a frozen ledge at the edge of the Pine Island Glacier. The ice shelf helps stabilize and contain the vast flow…