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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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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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.
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Studying How Microbes in Permafrost Respond to Thawing
07.11.2011
Recent assessments estimate that Arctic permafrost stores as much as 1,672 billion metric tons of carbon – 250 times what the United States emitted in greenhouse gasses in 2009. As temperatures rise, scientists worldwide are concerned about the possible consequences of a massive release of carbon from the soils thawing…
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Lessons from the Arctic for Drilling Ice Cores in the Antarctic
17.10.2011
Glaciologists from the Australian Antarctic Division (AAD) have recently returned from visiting the North Greeland Eemian Ice Drilling (NEEM) project, which is extracting ice cores from the Greenland Ice Sheet, to learn a few things that might help them with drilling they plan to undertake on the Antarctic Ice Sheet…
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NASA-led Study Shows Unprecedented Ozone Depletion in Arctic
05.10.2011
An international study led by NASA recently published in Nature indicates an unprecedented depletion in the ozone layer over the Arctic occurred last winter and spring. Scientists say the cause of the depletion appears to have been an unusually long period of extremely low temperatures in the stratosphere.
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Pole-to-pole Flights Provide First Global Picture of Greenhouse Gases
12.09.2011
After three years of research, a far-reaching project known as HIPPO allowed researchers to generate the first detailed 3D mapping of the global distribution of gases and particles that affect Earth’s climate. Using a specially designed aircraft to fly to different parts of the globe, the scientists were able to…
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Permafrost May Become Major Carbon Source by End of Century
31.08.2011
Soils at high latitudes might turn from a carbon sink into a major carbon source by the end of the 21st century, according to a recently developed model.
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Using Ethane to Track Atmospheric Methane Levels
19.08.2011
Research conducted in Greenland and Antarctica and published in the journal Nature suggests a common cause between between the decline of atmospheric methane (CH4) and atmospheric ethane (C2H6)at the end of the 20th century. Scientists involved in the study believe the drop in fossil-fuel sources is likely related to changes…
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Study of Anaktuvuk River Fire Highlights Major Impacts of Tundra Fires on Carbon Storage
31.07.2011
In 2007, the Anaktuvuk River Fire in Alaska – the largest ever recorded tundra fire in the Arctic – burned 1039 km² and released over 2.3 million tons of carbon into the atmosphere. A study of the region affected by the fire conducted by resarchers at the University of Alaska…
