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.

ESA’s GlobGlacier Project Fills in the Blanks in Global Glacier Inventory

13.09.2010

ESA’s GlobGlacier project, an ambitious initiative started in 2007 to establish a global picture of glaciers and ice caps from space has now successfully come to an end. End-users underlined its contributions during a final meeting in Zermatt (Switzerland). The project, which involved developing services to monitor glaciers with Earth…
Melting Rate in Greenland and Western Antarctica Half of Previous Estimates

08.09.2010

A study by a team of scientists from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Delft University of Technology (TU Delft), and the Netherlands Institute for Space Research (SRON), recently published a study in Nature Geoscience suggesting that previous assessments of the melting rate of the ice sheets over Greenland and West Antarctica…
Operation IceBridge Ensures Optimal Data Transmission to Researchers

02.09.2010

Operation IceBridge, NASA’s airborne mission to observe changes in polar land and sea ice, will embark on a fourth field season in October. Over the course of 2009, 41 flights were carried out over a distance of roughly 230 000km. Working with the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC)…
NASA’s ICESat Satellite Has Re-entered Earth’s Atmosphere after Final Successful Scientific Mission

31.08.2010

NASA’s Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation (ICESat) satellite was decommissioned after successfully completing its last scientific mission earlier this year and re-entered Earth’s atmosphere on Monday, August 30th. Debris from the ICESat spacecraft fell to Earth in the Barents Sea at approximately 5:00 am Eastern Daylight Time (09:00 GMT).
CO2 Release from Oceans at End of Last Ice Age Occured at Regional, Not Global Scale, New Study Says

26.08.2010

In a recent paper published in the journal Nature, a team of scientists lead by Rutgers Univsersity in New Jersey suggest that a massive carbon dioxide escape from the oceans could have occurred over a 1,000 year period after the end of the last glaciation. The paper shows that the…
First CryoSat-2 Data Released to Select Scientists

22.07.2010

The first data from CryoSat-2, launched three months ago by the European Space Agency (ESA), were released to a select group of 150 scientists from approximately 40 research institutes around the world. These select scientists had agreed to use this data to help fine-tune the satellite before its data is…
Re-Examining How Baleen Whales Locate Their Prey

16.07.2010

New research detailed in the journal Marine Mammal Science shows that bowhead whales, unlike most other whales, have a previously undiscovered sense of smell. The results of a study could force a new take on the way baleen whales locate their prey.
Cryosat-2 Surpassing Expectations Halfway through Commissioning Phase

05.07.2010

Halfway through its commissioning phase, the European Space Agency's CryoSat-2 satellite is “in very good shape, exceeding in-orbit specifications,” declared Prof. Duncan Wingham, Lead Investigator for the CryoSat mission at ESA's Living Planet Symposium in Bergen, Norway.
Shifting Winds Possibly Ended Last Ice Age

28.06.2010

As most scientists are still trying to understand how the Earth emerged from its last ice age, a review paper published this week in the journal Science suggests a global shift in winds as an answer. According to scientists, a chain of events beginning with the melting of the large…
Satellite Used in Polar Research Enters Retirement

28.06.2010

NASA's Tracking and Data Relay Satellite (TDRS) 1, which had been reassigned to the National Science Foundation (NSF) and its U.S. Antarctic Program partners in 1998 to perform scientific, educational, and operational endeavors, will be retired. The satellite transmitted the first Internet connection and live webcast from the North Pole,…