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.

Cryosat-2 Gets Go-ahead for Launch

26.11.2009

Now that is has completed its Flight Acceptance Review, Cryosat-2, the European Space Agency's new satellite destined to measure land icethickness, is set to be launched on February 25th, 2009 in Baikonur, Kazakhstan. Built to replace the original CryoSat, which was destroyed in a failed launch attempt in 2005, Cryosat-2…
International Expedition on Arctic Quest to Find Alternative Fuels

26.11.2009

An international team of scientists from the Marine Biogeochemistry and Geology and Geophysics departments of the US Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) led a team of university and government scientists to the Beaufort Sea to begin looking for methane hydrate (a large amount of methane is trapped within the crystal structure…
Study Shows East Antarctic Ice Loss Faster and Larger than Originally Thought

26.11.2009

Until now, scientists believed East Antarctica to be moremelt-resistant than West Antarctica and that it was in balance; howevera new study published in Nature Geoscience indicates that this in fact may notbe the case.
Ancient Ice Core to Provide New Insight into Future Climate Change

25.11.2009

An international team of scientists from Australia, Great Britain, the United States and France is hoping to learn more about the role of carbon dioxide in past climate changes to see how increasing levels of CO2 might influence our climate today. The aim of the ICECAP (Investigating the Cryospheric Evolution…
New Information on the Optical Properties of the Antarctic System

24.11.2009

The Antarctic system, which consists of the continent of Antarctica and the ocean surrounding it, plays an important role in the Earth's climate. Geophysicist Kai Rasmus from the University of Helsinki took measurements during three austral summers to study the optical properties of the Antarctic system in order to gather…
Interglacial Periods in Antarctica Warmer than Initially Thought

19.11.2009

A new study published in Nature by scientists from the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), the Open University, and the University of Bristol shows that temperatures during the warmer periods in between ice ages (inaterglacials) which occur approximately every 100,000 years may have been higher than previously thought. Based on a…
NASA’s Icebite Prepares for Mission to Mars in Antarctica

17.11.2009

Scientists involved in NASA's IceBite project are headed for University Valley in Antarctica's McMurdo Dry Valleys to test a series ofice-penetrating drills to determine which one would be suited for a future life-finding mission in the Martian polar north. This region of the Red Planet is of particular interest to…
Greenland Ice Sheet Loss Picking up Speed

16.11.2009

Scientists at the University of Bristol have been able to use both observations from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Mission (GRACE) satellite and the Regional Atmospheric Climate Model (RACMO2/GR) at high resolution to independently confirm an accelerated mass loss of the Greenland Ice Sheet. Their research, published in Science, shows…
Phytoplankton Trapping CO2 in Open Antarctic Waters

11.11.2009

According to a study conducted by British Antarctic Survey (BAS) scientists and published in Global Change Biology, phytoplankton are starting to flourish in new areas of open water and are trapping an estimated 3.5 million tons of carbon (or 12.8 million tones of CO2 equivalent) each year. While this is…
Disquieting Findings from Analysis of Sediment Core Taken from Northern Antarctic Peninsula

10.11.2009

According to a recent study conducted by researchers from the NationalOceanography Centre, Southampton (NOCS) and the University ofSouthhampton's School of Ocean and Earth Science (SEOS), not once in the past 14,000 years has there been a period of warmingand ice loss similar to the one we are currently experiencing, which…