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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A Century of Data Shows Warming on the Islas Orcadas since 1950
22.01.2010
More than a century’s worth of weather data from a base at the Islas Orcadas off the tip of Antarctica have revealed a spike in warming there since 1950. The base, which was founded by Scots in 1903, has been collecting daily weather data for over a century, giving scientists…
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Arctic Methane Emissions Reaching Record Levels
19.01.2010
On the heels of a string of reports on the methane emissions from the Arctic permafrost, a new study published in Science shows a massive spike in the amount of methane seeping from Arctic permafrost as it melts. As the study shows, methane emissions have risen by almost one-third in…
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CryoSat-2 Arrives Safely at Launch Site in Baikonur
18.01.2010
ESA has announced CryoSat-2 Earth Explorer satellite has arrived safely in Baikonur, Kazakhstan, to be prepared for launch on 25 February. The satellite, which left the ‘IABG’ test centre in Ottobrunn, Germany, on 12 January, will provide precise monitoring of the changes in the thickness of sea ice in the…
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Antarctic Warming Up Overall According to New Study
13.01.2010
So far, Antarctica seems to be resisting the global warming trend. However studies that reached this conclusion relied mostly upon data collected at various coastal weather stations and none from the interior of the continent, giving an incomplete picture. However by using an innovative technique, American scientists were able to…
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Warm Arctic, Cold Northern Hemisphere
13.01.2010
Temperatures in the Arctic have skyrocketed to unusually high levels while much of the Northern Hemisphere has been experiencing frigid temperatures in the past few weeks. While one may be prone to blame global warming, scientists say this unusual pattern is part of natural variability, caused by a large area…
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Invading Trees Likely to Cause Increased Warming in the Arctic
13.01.2010
Trees seem to be slowly moving northward as the tundra in the Arctic melts. According to a study from University of California Berkley scientists published in the online Early Edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the northward expansion of the treeline (the northernmost point at…
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Arctic Changes Influenced Ice Age Global Climate Patterns
13.01.2010
An international study led by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) is being published this week in Nature Geoscience. The study shows that water levels in the Bering Strait helped drive global climate patterns during ice ages dating back more than 100,000 years.
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Temperatures as Low as -100°C Could Be Reached at Dome A under “Perfect” Conditions
11.01.2010
Dome Argus (Dome A) in Antarctica could eventually see the coldest temperature ever recorded on the Earth, according to researchers from the British Antarctic Survey (BAS). Vostok Station currently holds the record for the coldest temperature ever measured on the planet, when the temperature dropped to -89.2°C on 21 July…
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Using Spy Satellites to Gain New Insight into Climate Change in the Arctic and Elsewhere
05.01.2010
As recently reported in the New York Times, the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has in the past year restarted a program in which the assets the US government uses to gather intelligence, which includes spy satellites and classified sensors, are made available to scientists so they can gain a…
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Warm Mid-Pliocene a Warning for Today’s Warming Arctic
31.12.2009
Scientists from the US Geological Survey found that the Arctic Ocean and the Nordic Seas were too warm to support summer sea ice during the mid-Pliocene warm period (3.3 to 3 million years ago) in a study published in Stratigraphy.
