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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Warm Ocean Water Melting Antarctic Ice Shelves from Below
26.04.2012
Results of a new multinational study published in Nature show that warming ocean water making itw way under ice shelves in Antarctica is a major cause of ice loss on the continent. Carried out by researchers from the British Antarctic Survey, Utrecht University, the University of California San Diego and…
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CryoSat-2 Produces First Map of Arctic Sea Ice Changes Throughout Winter
26.04.2012
Scientists have made the first map showing changes in the thickness of Arctic sea ice over the course of the boreal (northern) winter of 2010-2011 using data from CryoSat-2, a European Space Agency (ESA) satellite launched in April 2010 designed to track sea and land ice thickness changes at the…
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Newly Discovered Methane Source in the Arctic: Ocean Surface Waters
24.04.2012
According to a multi-institutional study published in Nature Geoscience, areas in the Arctic Ocean appear to be emitting the potent greenhouse gas methane (CH4). As a greenhouse gas, methane is 20 times more powerful than carbon dioxide (CO2).
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Study Shows Increase in Atmospheric CO2 Helped End Last Ice Age
10.04.2012
Scientists have been able to reconstruct past temperatures using proxy methods such as reading ice cores, tree rings and sediment cores from the bottom of lakes and oceans. They have also been able to reconstruct past levels of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere from air bubbles…
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Thawing Permafrost Attributed to Acute Global Warming in Past
10.04.2012
An international study conducted by researchers from the US, Italy and the UK published in Nature has shown that past thawing of permafrost on Earth and the carbon that was released from it into the atmosphere led to a runaway warming effect.
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NRC Releases Synthesis of Reports on the State of the Polar Regions
04.04.2012
The US National Research Council (NRC) has just released a synthesis of reports from thousands of scientists from 60 countries who participated in research projects during the International Polar Year (IPY) 2007- 2008.
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CryoSat Validation Mission Shows Blue Ice Region in Antarctica Rising
31.03.2012
As part of its mission to validate the data ESA’s CryoSat satellite delivers, a team of scientists recently took some field measurements in the blue ice region in the Dronning Maud Land in East Antarctica. What the team found is that the elevation of this vast region close to the…
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NASA’s Operation IceBridge 2012 Arctic Season Underway
20.03.2012
NASA’s Operation IceBridge to measure sea and land ice at the Poles began its mission for the 2012 Arctic season on 13 March. From now until May, a modified P-3 aircraft will fly daily missions out of Thule and Kangerlussaq in Greenland and will also make a trip to Fairbanks,…
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Multi-Year Sea Ice Loss in Arctic Leading to Increase in Mercury Pollution
05.03.2012
A recent NASA-led study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres has shown that declining multi-year sea ice cover in the Arctic over the past few decades has been intensifying a chemical reaction that ultimately results in greater deposits of toxic mercury in the Arctic.
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Salty Antarctic Soils Suck Moisture from Atmosphere
29.02.2012
Salty soils in the McMurdo Dry Valleys region of Antarctica suck moisture out of the atmosphere, according to research led by Oregon State University geologist Joseph Levy.
