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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Granite Boulder Connects the Dots between Antarctica and North America
18.07.2008
A lone granite boulder found atop the Nimrod Glacier in the Transantarctic Mountains provides additional evidence to support the theory that, hundreds of millions of years ago, parts of Antarctica were once connected to North America.
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NASA Robots to Help Scientists Collecting Data in Polar Regions
16.07.2008
Unmanned, autonomous NASA robots resembling miniaturized snowmobiles were tested in Alaska last month. These prototypes - called SnoMotes - will help scientists gathering accurate field data in remote or dangerous areas.
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Flying Robots to Monitor the Greenland Ice Sheet
16.07.2008
Researchers from the University of Colorado and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) are flying two small, crewless planes over a portion of the Greenland ice sheet this month. Their goal is to understand how meltwater-fed surface lakes interact with the ice sheet's dynamic movement and melt rate. Scientists think…
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150-Metre Ice Core Drawn from McCall Glacier
14.07.2008
A 150-meter ice core pulled from the McCall Glacier (Alaska) this summer may offer researchers their first quantitative look at up to two centuries of climate change in the region.
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Scientists Forecast a Very Low Arctic Sea Ice Cover at the End of the 2008 Summer Season
11.07.2008
The ice cover in the Arctic Ocean at the end of summer 2008 will, with almost 100% probability, be less than that of the year 2005 (the year with the second lowest sea ice extent ever measured). Climate scientists from the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research came…
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Controversy over Meltwater Lubrication under Greenland Ice Sheet
04.07.2008
After much concern was made about ice sheet lubrication by seeping meltwater in Greenland, scientists from Utrecht University in the Netherlands now suggest meltwater only has a negligible effect on the rate at which the ice sheet moves on the western edge of Greenland. This theory, however, is far from…
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Penguins Sound the Alarm over the Health of World Oceans
03.07.2008
A new study was conducted on penguins from the tropics to Antarctica and published in the July-August edition of the journal BioScience. According to the author, Dee Boersma from the University of Washington, penguins are sounding the alarm over catastrophic changes occurring throughout the oceans worldwide.
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Climate Forecasts Depend on Accurate Ice Sheet Modelling
03.07.2008
Progress and future research objectives in the field of glacier movement is currently being considered by the European Science Foundation (ESF). The objective is to be able to model the flow of ice sheets and glaciers more accurately. It is important for climate modelling to know how polar ice caps…
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Deep Sea Arctic Underwater Volcanoes
27.06.2008
Evidence has been found deep beneath the ice-covered Arctic Ocean for explosive volcanic eruptions at about 4,000 metres below the sea surface. This finding, published in the journal Nature, refutes previous theories that such violent explosions could not possibly occur at such a significant depth.
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Geographic North Pole Might Be Ice-Free This Summer
24.06.2008
Field observations and satellite data show that the immediate area around the geographic North Pole is now mostly thin annual (first-year) ice, which could melt entirely this summer It would mostly be symbolic, since thicker ice will still survive the summer in other areas of the Arctic.
