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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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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Sea Ice Extent Low in Barents Sea and High in Bering Sea, according to NSIDC
12.03.2012
Continuing the trend from January 2012, Arctic sea ice extent was low on the Atlantic side of the Arctic and high on the Pacific side during February 2012, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) in Boulder, Colorado. Temperatures in the Barents, Laptev and Kara Seas in…
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Vast Antarctic Algal Bloom Can Be Seen from Space
07.03.2012
A massive algal bloom which has appeared off the coast of Mac Robertson Land in Antarctica is so large it is clearly visible to NASA’s Modis satellite.
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NASA Study Finds Old Arctic Ice Vanishing Rapidly
02.03.2012
A new NASA study has found that the oldest and thickest ice in the Arctic appears to be vanishing faster than the younger and thinner ice at the edges of the ice cap covering the Arctic Ocean.
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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.
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Life in Arctic Waters Persists Even in Winter
24.02.2012
According to preliminary results from research funded by the US National Science Foundation (NSF), life in the icy waters off the Alaskan coast does not stop completely in winter for microscopic organisms at the base of the food chain, despite cold and dark conditions. This research is particularly interesting as…
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Russians Reach Subglacial Lake Vostok
09.02.2012
On Sunday 5 February 2012, a Russian drilling team was able to penetrate the surface of Lake Vostok, the largest subglacial lake in Antarctica (250 km long and 30 km wide), which began to be covered by ice between 15 and 34 million years ago. Having not had contact with…
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Moving Teardrop-Shaped Lakes Discovered on George VI Ice Shelf
03.02.2012
Researhcers from the University of Chicago have been keeping an eye on teardrop-shaped lakes on top of the George VI Ice Shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula, which travel as much as 1.5 metres a day – but in a very unusual manner.
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Arctic Summer Sea Ice Extent Affects Winters in Central Europe
03.02.2012
Scientists from the Research Unit Potsdam at the Alfred Wengener Institute for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) have been able to connect reduced summer sea ice extent in the Arctic with colder and snowier winters in Central Europe in a study published in the journal Tellus A.
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Russian Drill Team Close to Penetrating Lake Vostok
31.01.2012
A Russian drilling team is close to penetrating subglacial Lake Vostok, located more than three and a half kilometers deep in the Antarctic Ice Sheet, not far from the Russian Vostok Station at the Magnetic South Pole. After two decades of drilling through several kilometres of ice, the team is…
