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.

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…
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…
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.
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…
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…
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.
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…
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.
Boost in Funding for US Polar Research Programme

06.03.2008

The National Science Foundation (NSF) is looking to boost its 2009 fiscal year (FY) budget by about 13 percent over the current budget year, with a request for .85 billion. The total budget request for the Office of Polar Programs (OPP) is a shade over 0 million, an 11 percent…
New Modelling Approach to Estimate Sea Ice Thickness

06.03.2008

A new modelling approach was recently developed to estimate sea ice thickness by scientists with the U.S. Geological Survey and the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow. This is the first model to be entirely based on historical observations.