Antarctica | Common News Update

Apr72020 by adminNo Comments

Coronavirus complicates journeys home from Antarctica

Science

The British Antarctic Survey (BAS) says it can now bring home all of its staff that need to leave the White Continent. At the end of the Southern Hemisphere summer, everyone except a core team is extracted - but that procedure has been complicated this year by Covid-19.Some of the usual routes - such as through Chile via ship or aeroplane - have been closed because of lockdowns.BAS people are being ferried to the Falkland Islands with the intention of flying them on to the UK with the RAF.This will take some time, however, so the research agency is also now chartering a cruise ship in Port Stanley to act as temporary accommodation. The vessel, Hebridean Sky, will additionally act as somewhere to isolate the scientists and other s...

Mar122020 by adminNo Comments

Greenland and Antarctica ice loss accelerating

Science

Media playback is unsupported on your device Earth's great ice sheets, Greenland and Antarctica, are now losing mass six times faster than they were in the 1990s thanks to warming conditions.A comprehensive review of satellite data acquired at both poles is unequivocal in its assessment of accelerating trends, say scientists.Between them, Greenland and Antarctica lost 6.4 trillion tonnes of ice in the period from 1992 to 2017.This was sufficient to push up global sea-levels up by 17.8mm."That's not a good news story," said Prof Andrew Shepherd from the University of Leeds in the UK."Today, the ice sheets contribute about a third of all sea-level rise, whereas in the 1990s, their contribution was actually pretty small at about 5%. This has impo...

Jan282020 by adminNo Comments

Antarctica melting: Journey to the ‘doomsday’ glacier

Science

The images are murky at first.Sediment sweeps past the camera as Icefin, a bright yellow remotely operated robot submarine, moves tentatively forward under the ice.Then the waters begin to clear.Icefin is under almost half a mile (600m) of ice, at the front of one the fastest-changing large glaciers in the world. Suddenly a shadow looms above, an overhanging cliff of dirt-encrusted ice.It doesn't look like much, but this is a unique image - the first ever pictures from a frontier that is changing our world.Icefin has reached the point at which the warm ocean water meets the wall of ice at the front of the mighty Thwaites glacier - the point where this vast body of ice begins to melt. The ...

Dec122019 by adminNo Comments

Denman Glacier: Deepest point on land found in Antarctica

Science

Media playback is unsupported on your device The deepest point on continental Earth has been identified in East Antarctica, under Denman Glacier.This ice-filled canyon reaches 3.5km (11,500ft) below sea level. Only in the ocean are the valleys deeper still.The discovery is illustrated in a new map of the White Continent that reveals the shape of the bedrock under the ice sheet in unprecedented detail.Its features will be critical to our understanding of how the polar south might change in the future.For comparison, the lowest exposed land on Earth, at the Dead Sea shore, is just 413m (1,355ft) below sea level.The new finding shows, for example, previously unrecognised ridges that will impede the retreat of melting glaciers in a warming world; ...

Nov302019 by adminNo Comments

Antarctica: Metal meteorite quest set to get under way

Science

Media playback is unsupported on your device A team of British scientists has arrived in the Antarctic to try to find the continent's "missing meteorites".The group, from the University of Manchester, will spend six weeks scouring a remote region for lumps of iron that have fallen from the sky.These pieces of metal represent the shattered remains of small planet-like objects that were destroyed in the early years of the Solar System.Iron meteorites are rare, however, especially in Antarctica.Less than 1% of all the space rocks recovered in searches on the continent are of the metal type, compared with about 5% elsewhere in the world.But the Manchester researchers believe they know the reason for this statistical deficit. Their modelling work s...