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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Arctic Sea Ice Still at Risk despite Cold Winter
19.03.2008
NASA satellite observations shows that a cold winter in some regions of the Arctic has yielded an increase in new (thin) sea ice, while the surface of older (thicker) sea ice has continued to decline.
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Studying Antarctica during the Harshest Winter on Earth
19.03.2008
John Priscu, a Montana State University scientist with an international reputation for polar research, is spending his 24th season in Antarctica. The only difference is that this time he will be doing field work during the Antarctic winter. Priscu and his team team will be working on several research projects.
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Satellites Detect Winter Rains to Save Arctic Grazers
19.03.2008
Winter rain can turn out to be devastating for grazing animals when it falls just before it freezes. In October 2003, twenty thousand musk oxen starved to death on Canada's Banks Island from such a catastrophe. Thomas Grenfell, a University of Washington professor of atmospheric sciences, and Jaakko Putkonen, research…
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Robotic Research in Antarctica
18.03.2008
Tested during the austral summer of 2007, the first ever autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to be used in polar research were successfully flown over the Antarctic continent. This joint initiative conducted by the British Antarctica Survey (BAS) and the Technical University of Braunschweig (TUBS) in Germany opens up a…
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Planet’s Glaciers Melting Even Faster
17.03.2008
Data collected by the World Glacier Monitoring Service (WGMS) show that the average rate of melting and thinning of the world's glaciers over 2005-2006 had doubled in comparison to 2004-2005.
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Melting Ice Sheets Could Cause Earthquakes
17.03.2008
A new study which was conducted using a sophisticated computer model shows a link between seismic activity and the presence or absence of large ice sheets: seismicity levels are low in presence of large ice sheets but become higher as the ice melts. This research will be published in the…
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Splitting Iceberg Spotted from Space
17.03.2008
On March 4th, 2008, C-CORE, a Canadian ice-tracking service which is part of the Polar View consortium, captured the break up of a massive iceberg that had calved off of the Larsen B ice shelf in late April 2005 and had drifted its way into the warmer waters of the…
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EPICA Project Rewarded by the European Union
13.03.2008
The European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica (EPICA) is one of the four laureates to have received the European Union's Descartes Prize on March 12, 2008. Amounting to a total of 1.36 million euros, this award is granted to outstanding European projects having excelled in scientific research.
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Arctic Climate Models Polar Bear as a Threatened Species
12.03.2008
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) is currently considering a proposal to list the polar bear as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act. This proposal is largely based on scientific models of the Arctic climate. Scientists from the International Polar Bear Science Team evaluated existing models to…
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Hibernation-Like Behaviour in Antarctic Fish
06.03.2008
Scientists from the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) and the University of Birmingham have discovered that the Antarctic cod Notothenia coriiceps adopts a survival strategy similar to hibernation, thereby saving energy during the long Antarctic winter.
