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TOPIC: Antarctica
Blobrana


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ICECAP
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The secrets of the largest ice sheet on earth are to be revealed under plans to map the Antarctic landscape in detail for the first time.
A team including Edinburgh scientists is to travel across East Antarctica in a four-year project to explore the land hidden beneath the ice-covered region.

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Blobrana


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Gamburtsev subglacial mountains
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The mission of this International Polar Year (IPY) project is to uncover secrets of the enigmatic Gamburtsev subglacial mountains that are buried by up to 4 km of ice; to hunt for the oldest ice on our planet; to study subglacial lakes and to discover new clues of past, present and future climate change.
The Gamburtsev subglacial mountains are thought to be the birthplace of the vast East Antarctic Ice Sheet. This project will reveal clues to how the mountains were formed and provide scientists with the best location for future ice core drilling campaigns.

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Blobrana


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RE: Antarctica
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Expedition set for 'ghost peaks'
It is perhaps the last great Antarctic expedition - to find an explanation for why there is a great mountain range buried under the White Continent.
The Gamburtsevs match the Alps in scale but no-one has ever seen them because they are covered by up to 4km of ice.
Geologists struggle to understand how such a massif can have formed and persisted in the middle of Antarctica.

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Blobrana


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Antarctic visit to study sea ice
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Scientists flew to New Zealand's Scott Base, on the first post-winter Antarctica New Zealand flight last week, to study the growth and thickness of winter coastal sea ice in McMurdo Sound.

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Blobrana


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RE: Antarctica
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Tiny fossils have helped refine the timing of the climate shift that gave rise to Antarctica's remarkable Dry Valleys, a landscape akin to Mars.
The famously ice-free terrain enjoyed more benign, tundra-like conditions 14 million years ago - but then flipped to the intensely cold setting seen today.

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During the Permian period the plant life became dominated by fern-like plants such as Glossopteris, which grew in swamps. Over time these swamps became deposits of coal in the Transantarctic Mountains. Towards the end of the Permian period continued warming led to a dry, hot climate over much of Gondwana.

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Blobrana


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Wilkins Ice Shelf
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New evidence has emerged that a large plate of floating ice shelf attached to Antarctica is breaking up, in a troubling sign of global warming, the European Space Agency (ESA) said on Thursday 10 July 2007.
Images taken by its Envisat remote-sensing satellite show that Wilkins Ice Shelf is “hanging by its last thread” to Charcot Island, one of the plate’s key anchors to the Antarctic peninsula.

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Blobrana


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Wilkins Ice Shelf has experienced further break-up with an area of about 160 km˛ breaking off from 30 May to 31 May 2008. ESAs Envisat satellite captured the event the first ever-documented episode to occur in winter.
Wilkins Ice Shelf, a broad plate of floating ice south of South America on the Antarctic Peninsula, is connected to two islands, Charcot and Latady. In February 2008, an area of about 400 km˛ broke off from the ice shelf, narrowing the connection down to a 6 km strip; this latest event in May has further reduced the strip to just 2.7 km.

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Blobrana


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Antarctic ice streams
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A seismologist at Washington University in St. Louis and colleagues at Penn State and Newcastle University, U.K., have found seismic signals from a giant river of ice in Antarctica that make California's earthquake problem seem trivial.
The ice stream is essentially a giant glacier 60 miles wide and one-half mile thick. The data show that the river of ice moves about 18 inches within 10 minutes, remains still for 12 hours, then moves another eighteen inches. Each time it moves, it gives off seismic waves that are recorded at seismographs all around Antarctica, and even as far away as Australia.

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Blobrana


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RE: Antarctica
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A full recovery of the stratospheric ozone hole could modify climate change in the Southern Hemisphere and even amplify Antarctic warming, according to scientists from the University of Colorado at Boulder, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA.
While Earth's average surface temperatures have been increasing, the interior of Antarctica has exhibited a unique cooling trend during the austral summer and fall caused by ozone depletion.
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Blobrana


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Before ice first began to form in Antarctica around 34 million years ago, the Earth was a very different place - but then greenhouse conditions swiftly gave way to an icehouse climate, causing the oceans to become less acidic.
Scientists at the University of Southampton's School of Ocean and Earth Science, based at the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton UK and Germany's GKSS Research Centre have been piecing together how Earth's changing climate affected ocean chemistry during this period of transition. Their work sheds light on the links between glaciation and the ocean carbon cycle.

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