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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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…
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Underwater Ridge Key to Better Understanding Thwaites Glacier Flow
31.10.2011
According to a new study in Geophysical Research Letters, the retreat of the Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica is likely to accelerate within the next two decades. Due to its potential to contribute to sea level rise, the Thwaites Glacier is being closely monitored, along with the Getz Ice Shelf…
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Greenland Ice Sheet Sees Extreme Melting Despite Less than Record Temperatures
21.10.2011
In their preliminary results posted online, a team from the Cryospheric Processes Laboratory at the City College of New York (CCNY) led by Dr. Marco Tedesco explains how the Greenland Ice Sheet can experience extreme melting even when temperatures do not reach record highs.
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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…
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Half of Canadian Ice Shelves Lost in Last Six Years
30.09.2011
A study conducted by Derek Mueller from Carleton University and Luke Copland from the University of Ottawa shows that Canada has been losing its ice shelves at un unprecdented rate; 50% have been lost over the past six years.
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New Model Allows Scientists to Make Better Seasonal Arctic Sea Ice Forecasts
27.09.2011
A study published in Geophysical Research Letters suggests that while accurate predictions for the extent of Arctic sea ice can be derived from the conditions of the previous autumn, longer-term predictions require a better understanding of the impact of climate trends on the sea ice. Current conditions may be an…
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Minimal Arctic Sea Ice Extent only Second to 2007 Record, NSIDC Says
20.09.2011
The sea ice cover over the Arctic Ocean might have reached its lowest extent for the year, the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) in Boulder, Colorado said in a September 15th media release. This year's sea minimal sea ice extent covered only 4.33 million km² on September 9th,…
