One of the biggest challenges in predicting Antarctica’s deeply uncertain future is understanding exactly what’s driving its ice loss. A vast network of lakes and streams lies beneath the thick ice sheet. This water can lubricate the ice, allowing it to slide more rapidly toward the ocean. Read more at The Conversation
Researchers on Australia's Antarctic icebreaker say some of the sea creatures they have been collecting could be new to science. Read more at ABC NEWS.
Antarctic sea ice has again fallen to a near-record low as a new study shows the system is undergoing a significant "structural change". Scientists have been using satellite images over the past 45 years to track the extent of sea ice on the fringe of the continent. Read more at ABC NEWS
Studies of ancient DNA have tended to focus on frozen land in the northern hemisphere, where woolly mammoths and bison roamed. Meanwhile, Antarctica has received relatively little attention. We set out to change that. Read more at The Conversation
Flowing clockwise around Antarctica, the Antarctic Circumpolar Current is the strongest ocean current on the planet. It’s five times stronger than the Gulf Stream and more than 100 times stronger than the Amazon River. Read more at The Conversation
The Denman Glacier spans an area 16 kilometres wide and 110km long in East Antarctica, around 5,000km to the south of Australia. Today, it's melting before our eyes — faster than scientists expected. Read more at ABC NEWS
Australia's icebreaker is about to embark on one of its most important missions since coming into service more than three years ago. Read more at ABC NEWS
Australia’s Antarctic territory represents the largest sliver of the ice continent. For decades, Australian scientists have headed to one of our three bases – Mawson, Davis and Casey – as well as the base on sub-Antarctic Macquarie Island, to research everything from ecology to climate science. Read more at The Conversation
urious thing is happening underneath the Antarctic oceans: the food chain is changing. Last year, in McMurdo Sound, it changed in some unexpected ways. Read more at COSMOS
The size of the Antarctic ice sheet can be hard to comprehend. Two kilometres thick on average and covering nearly twice the area of Australia, the ice sheet holds enough freshwater to raise global sea levels by 58 metres. Read more at The Conversation
On a remote stretch of coastline in East Antarctica, a team of scientists is about to peer beneath the sea ice here for the first time. Read more at ABC NEWS
Antarctica, the world’s most remote, harsh and pristine continent, is not free from marine pollution. Where human activity goes, plastic debris inevitably follows. Read more at The Conversation.
Over the past week, more than 450 researchers gathered in Hobart for the inaugural Australian Antarctic Research Conference — the first such event in more than a decade.
Early career researchers have issued a statement, warning urgent action is needed to prevent catastrophic sea level rise around the world. Read more at ABC.
Analysis of air bubbles trapped in ice cores has made it possible to reconstruct these variations in composition over the last 500,000 years. Read more at The Conversation
Australia has described the outcome of a meeting between members of the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources as a "backwards step". Attendees said Russia and China vetoed all proposed measures, including one to renew existing krill management measures. Read more at ABC News
Last year Antarctica’s sea ice was 1.6m sq km below average – the size of Britain, France, Germany and Spain combined. This week it had even less than that. Read more at The Guardian
The Southern Ocean encircling Antarctica is the world’s largest feeding ground for baleen whales – species like humpbacks that filter tiny organisms from seawater for food. In the 20th century, whalers killed roughly 2 million large whales in the Southern Ocean. Some populations, like the Antarctic blue whale, were reduced by more than 99% and have been struggling to recover, even though most nations ended commercial whaling in the mid-1980s. Read more at The Conversation
Previous estimates of ice shelf loss come from satellite measurements, which captured ice shelves gradually thinning in recent years. We tracked how much extra ice had been lost as icebergs calve away from the retreating edge of the continent. We found Antarctica’s ice shelves have lost twice as much mass as previous studies suggested. Read more on The Conversation
Something extraordinary is happening above Antarctica, and it might bring unusual weather to the southern hemisphere for months to come. Read more at The Conversation.
The southern lights have inspired artists for more then 200 years. Here are some of the best examples from across the decades. Read more at The Conversation
The scientific and broader community must join together to advance Southern Ocean science and protect this vital natural asset. Read more at The Conversation
The temperature above the east Antarctic coastline warmed by about 50 degrees Celsius in a week earlier in July. The event, called a Sudden Stratospheric Warming has the potential to impact Australia's weather through August and possibly well into spring. Read more at ABC
In some of the most remote places on Earth, tags attached to seals collect data at the cutting edge of ocean science. Read more at The Conversation
It is often said AI will take the jobs humans should be doing — but in this case, the human researchers are happy enough to pass on the job of scanning thousands of hours of recordings made deep in the Southern Ocean, freeing them up for the pursuit of scientific breakthroughs. Read more at the ABC
In 1968, an aircraft flew over the Larsen B ice shelf in Antarctica. More than six decades later, photos taken on that flight have been used to create a 3D model of the region's melting glaciers. Read more at ABC
Australia has a long history of bushfires. The 2019-2020 Black Summer was the worst in recorded history. But was that the worst it could get? Read more at The Conversation
A world-leading oceanographer at the University of Tasmania has been awarded an Australian Research Council Australian Laureate Fellowship to develop precision tracking of changes in the Earth’s climate system as it responds to emission reductions. Professor Nathan Bindoff is one of 17 Laureate Fellows announced by the Australian Research Council today, winning a grant of $3,443,000 million over the next five years. Read more at UTAS
If you hear the words "climate change" and you begin to drift away, you're not alone.
It's called "climate fatigue", the idea that the challenge is too big, too difficult to comprehend, too scary so you just switch off.
So how do you communicate the urgency of the climate crisis without overwhelming an audience?
That was best selling Icelandic author, environmental campaigner, and former presidential candidate Andri Snaer Magnason's challenge when he set about writing his book, On Time and Water.
The Southern Ocean, a region critical to Earth’s climate, hosts vast blooms of microscopic ocean plants known as phytoplankton. They form the very basis of the Antarctic food web. Read more at The Conversation
Dr Petra Heil of the Australian Antarctic Division, and Dr Alex Fraser of the Australian Antarctic Program Partnership at the University of Tasmania, are collaborators in the Earth Dynamics Geodetic Explorer (EDGE) proposal led by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego. Scripps glaciologist Prof Helen Fricker is the Principal investigator for the EDGE satellite mission and a University of Tasmania alumni. Read more at UTAS
