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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Greenland Bedrock Rose Faster after Anomalous Ice Loss
14.12.2011
The unusually warm melting season in 2010 led to a spike in ice loss from the southern part of the Greenland Ice Sheet of about 100 billion tons, according to research conducted by Michael Bevis, professor in the School of Earth Sciences at Ohio State University, and colleagues. This spike…
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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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Scientist from BBC’s Frozen Planet Investigating Pine Island Glacier Contribution to Sea Level Rise
07.12.2011
This week, a team of two scientists and two support staff from the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) left Rothera Research Station on the Antarctic Peninsula for their remote field site on Pine Island Glacier in Western Antarctica to study how the glacier loses ice and its possible contribution future sea…
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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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Arctic Permafrost Has Potential to Release More Carbon than Previously Estimated
30.11.2011
A study looking at survey results from 41 international scientists recently published in the journal Nature suggests that the levels of greenhouse gases to be released from thawing permafrost could be significantly higher than previously estimated.
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Current Arctic Sea Ice Loss Unprecedented for past 1,500 Years
25.11.2011
Scientists at Natural Resources Canada have reported in a study published in Nature that recent dramatic Arctic sea ice loss is greater than any natural variation in the past 1,500 years. The loss has been driven by a series of factors that never coincided in historical periods of major sea ice…
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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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IceBridge Project Finds Major Crack in Pine Island Glacier
31.10.2011
A team of scientists participating in NASA's IceBridge mission were flying over a portion of West Antarctica's Pine Island Glacier on October 14th when they discovered a 29 km crack across the glacier’s tongue. The 80-metre wide crack is the first step in the creation of a massive new 800…
