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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Increasing Levels of Greenhouse Gasses Disrupting Glaciation Patterns
09.01.2012
According to a study conducted by researchers from University College London, the Unviersity of Cambridge and the University of Florida and published in Nature Geoscience, unprecented levels of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere are disrupting the Earth’s normal patterns of glaciation and may delay the onset of the next ice…
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New Zealanders Measuring Movement of Magnetic South Pole
31.12.2011
Two research scientists from New Zealand, Stewart Bennie and Tony Hurst of GNS Science, are currently on an expedition in Antarctica to take measurements of the Magnetic South Pole.
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CryoSat-2 Monitoring Oceans Now, Too
26.12.2011
According to the European Space Agency, its CryoSat-2 satellite will soon be used to monitor sea conditions for marine forecasting. The satellite was launched in April 2010 to measure variations in land and sea ice thickness in the Polar Regions, and the satellite has delivered. However while the satellite’s orbit…
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International Team of Scientists Validates ESA’s CryoSat Data in Antarctica
09.12.2011
An international team of Australian and German scientists has concluded the first leg of a major in-situ measurement campaign to validate data from the European Space Agency’s CryoSat mission. The campaign focused on the region around Law Dome and Totten Glacier in East Antarctica, both ideal locations to collect validation…
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Antarctic Melting Linked to Tropical Ocean Temperatures
09.12.2011
According to recent research by Professor Erik Steig from the University of Washington, the accelerated melting of the Pine Island and Thwaites Glaciers in West Antarctica could be caused by a rise in sea-surface temperatures in the tropical Pacific Ocean.
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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…
