SciencePoles news
Recent Polar Science and Climate Change news are featured here. Our news RSS feed will inform you when news are published on this website.
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Scientist from BBC’s Frozen Planet Investigating Pine Island Glacier Contribution to Sea Level Rise
07.12.2011
This week, a team of two scientists and two support staff from the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) left Rothera Research Station on the Antarctic Peninsula for their remote field site on Pine Island Glacier in Western Antarctica to study how the glacier loses ice and its possible contribution future sea…
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Inferring Past Krill Populations from Antarctic Fur Seal Hairs
05.12.2011
A team of scientists from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), Utah State University, the Institute of Oceanology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Brooklyn College have inferred changes in krill numbers by analyzing the shift in a stable Nitrogen-15 isotope (δ15N) marker found in Antarctic…
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Plummeting CO2 Levels Led to Formation of Antarctic Ice Sheet, Study Shows
05.12.2011
According to a paper recently published in the journal Science, a roughly 40% drop in CO2 levels triggered to the formation of Antarctica’s ice sheet approximately 34 million years ago. A team of scientists from Yale and Purdue Universities identified 600 parts of per million of CO2 in the Earth’s…
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Arctic Permafrost Has Potential to Release More Carbon than Previously Estimated
30.11.2011
A study looking at survey results from 41 international scientists recently published in the journal Nature suggests that the levels of greenhouse gases to be released from thawing permafrost could be significantly higher than previously estimated.
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Climate Change Stunting Growth of 100-Year-Old Moss Shoots in Antarctica
28.11.2011
In a paper to be published in January in the journal Global Change Biology, a team of scientists from the University of Wollongong (UOW) in conjunction with nuclear scientists from the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organization (ANSTO) suggests that mosses, the dominant plants in Antarctica, have been affected by current climate change.…
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Current Arctic Sea Ice Loss Unprecedented for past 1,500 Years
25.11.2011
Scientists at Natural Resources Canada have reported in a study published in Nature that recent dramatic Arctic sea ice loss is greater than any natural variation in the past 1,500 years. The loss has been driven by a series of factors that never coincided in historical periods of major sea ice…
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Origins of Gamburtsev Sublacial Mountains Explained
17.11.2011
An international team of scientists from seven nations recently published in Nature their findings regarding the origins of the Gamburtsev Subglacial Mountains, located 3 km beneath the East Antarctic Ice Sheet. How the mountains formed is a mystery that has interested scientists since they were first discovered in 1958 as…
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Treeline in Alaska seeing Faster-Growing Tree Species in a Warming Climate
14.11.2011
A study recently published in the journal Environmental Research Letters, found that some white spruce trees in the far north of Alaska have experienced a growth spurt over the course of the past century, particularly since 1950. The study covers 1,000 years of climate history and suggests that ecosystems in…
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Colossal Storm Hits Alaska
14.11.2011
During the second week of November, a major storm that meteorologists refer to as an “extra tropical cyclone” hit Alaska’s western coastline, pounding the region with heavy snow and unusually strong winds. The storm displaced thousands of coastal residents and left behind widespread damage, including flooding, power outages and destroyed…
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Improving Our Understanding of Ice Formation in Arctic Clouds
07.11.2011
It is quite common to find shallow, persistent cloud layers made from a mixture of both liquid water droplets and ice crystals in the Arctic. In cloud tops warmer than -38°C, aerosols that freeze at warmer temperatures, known as ice nuclei, are needed for ice crystals to form.
