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Here’s a video that’s going viral on YouTube. National Geographic photographer Paul Nicklen traveled to Antarctica to photograph leopard seals in the water. After arriving, they came across one of the largest leopard seals his experienced guide had ever seen. What happened next you’ll have to see to believe: VIDEO LINK For more on this event, you can read this interview with Paul Nicklen, and check out the photographs that resulted in this gallery.

<p>WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) -- A beverage company has asked a team to drill through Antarctica's ice for a lost cache of some vintage Scotch whiskey that has been on the rocks since a century ago.</p> <p>The drillers will be trying to reach two crates of McKinlay and Co. whiskey that were shipped to the Antarctic by British polar explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton as part of his abandoned 1909 expedition.</p>

MORE than 100 penguin-loving tourists including dozens from Britain are trapped by ice off Antarctica aboard a Russian ice-breaker cruise ship... The Kapitan Khlebnikov is in a bay near Snow Hill island, located off the northeastern end of the Antarctic Peninsula, and cannot leave as the bay is sealed off with ice... Everything is calm aboard the ice-breaker, nothing is threatening the passengers and crew... There were 105 passengers aboard the vessel ...The ship has been at its current location for four days. "To put it plainly, the ship got stuck between an island and an ice massif.''

Researchers are recovering beautiful fossils from the Cerrejón Formation of Colombia. One was a giant snake, called the “Titanoboa.” Most recently, a study examined the formation’s fossilized flora, which looked the same as modern plants, and the rainforest environment in which they lived.[1] This research dovetails nicely with other studies on ancient earth’s turbulent climate. There is evidence of dramatic...

WASHINGTON (AFP) – NASA next week begins the most extensive aerial survey of Earth's surface to chart the impact of global warming, with six years of flights over Antarctica to understand the frozen continent's glaciers and ice sheets. The US space agency said the massive aerial survey, part of a program dubbed Operation Ice Bridge, will get underway on October 15. ... Space officials said the plane, crew and scientists depart October 12 from NASA's Dryden Aircraft Operations Facility in Palmdale, California, and fly to Punta Arenas, Chile, where they will be based through mid-November. Some 50 scientists and support...

The search for the best observatory site in the world has lead to the discovery of what is thought to be the coldest, driest, calmest place on Earth — a place where no human is thought to have ever set foot. To search for the perfect site to take pictures of the heavens, a U.S.-Australian research team combined data from satellites, ground stations and climate models in a study to assess the many factors that affect astronomy — cloud cover, temperature, sky-brightness, water vapor, wind speeds and atmospheric turbulence. The researchers pinpointed a site, known simply as Ridge A, that...

Weatherman Justin Chamberlain said the Islands had been under the influence of a highly unstable convective south/southwest air flow originating in Antarctica, keeping air temperatures below freezing. At times the wind was strong or gale force, leading to blizzard conditions and snowdrifts. The duration of the Antarctic showery feed was unusual, he said, due in part to an area of high pressure covering much of South America, which blocked the usual mobile westerly flow. Forty-three centimetres of snow were recorded, a new record at Mount Pleasant. It is comparable to July 2004, when a total of 33cm was recorded, and...

(CNN) -- Nearly a decade after she was rescued from a remote Antarctic research station after diagnosing herself with breast cancer, Dr. Jerri Nielsen died early Tuesday, her brother said. She was 57. Jerri Nielsen treated herself for breast cancer while stationed at the South Pole in 1999. Jerri Nielsen treated herself for breast cancer while stationed at the South Pole in 1999. Nielsen had been fighting the latest round of cancer for the past five years, brother Eric Cahill said. She died just before 4 a.m. in Massachusetts, surrounded by her family, he said. "She would want to be...

POSSIBLY the clearest skies on Earth have been found - but to exploit them, astronomers will have to set up a telescope in one of the planet's harshest climates...[Scientists] evaluated different factors that affect telescope vision, such as the amount of water vapour, wind speeds and atmospheric turbulence...The team found that the Antarctic plateau offers world-beating atmospheric conditions - as long as telescopes are raised 20 meters above its frozen surface...[The Antarctic air is] drier than the Atacama desert in Chile [where some of the best telescopes in the world are currently located].

Millions of years ago, rivers ran in Antarctica through craggy mountain valleys that were strangely similar to the modern European Alps, Chinese and British scientists reported on Wednesday. In a study published by the British journal Nature, the scientists described a vast terrain that had been hidden beneath ice up to two miles thick for eons, until new imaging technology recently uncovered them. "The landscape has probably been preserved beneath the ice sheet for around 14 million years," the paper said. The imaging revealed "classic Alpine topography" similar to Europe's Alps, showing that rivers had once existed on Antarctica and...

TROMSOE, Norway (Reuters) – An area of an Antarctic ice shelf almost the size of New York City has broken into icebergs this month after the collapse of an ice bridge widely blamed on global warming, a scientist said Tuesday. "The northern ice front of the Wilkins Ice Shelf has become unstable and the first icebergs have been released," Angelika Humbert, glaciologist at the University of Muenster in Germany, said of European Space Agency satellite images of the shelf. Humbert told Reuters about 700 sq km (270.3 sq mile) of ice -- bigger than Singapore or Bahrain and almost the...

ICE is expanding in much of Antarctica, contrary to the widespread public belief that global warming is melting the continental ice cap. The results of ice-core drilling and sea ice monitoring indicate there is no large-scale melting of ice over most of Antarctica, although experts are concerned at ice losses on the continent's western coast. Antarctica has 90 per cent of the Earth's ice and 80 per cent of its fresh water, The Australian reports. Extensive melting of Antarctic ice sheets would be required to raise sea levels substantially, and ice is melting in parts of west Antarctica. The destabilisation...

ICE is expanding in much of Antarctica, contrary to the widespread public belief that global warming is melting the continental ice cap. The results of ice-core drilling and sea ice monitoring indicate there is no large-scale melting of ice over most of Antarctica, although experts are concerned at ice losses on the continent's western coast. Antarctica has 90 per cent of the Earth's ice and 80 per cent of its fresh water. Extensive melting of Antarctic ice sheets would be required to raise sea levels substantially, and ice is melting in parts of west Antarctica. The destabilisation of the Wilkins...

PARIS (AFP) – The UN Environment Programme (UNEP) said the breakway of a Jamaica-sized ice shelf from the Antarctic peninsula could accelerate global warming in this already vulnerable region. Satellite pictures show a 40-kilometre (25-mile) ice bridge that was the Wilkins Ice Shelf's last link to the coast had now shattered at its narrowest point, about 500 metres (yards) wide, UNEP said. The Wilkins Ice Shelf once covered around 16,000 square kilometres (6,000 square miles) before it began to retreat in the 1990s, and by last May the ice bridge was all that connected it to Charcot and Latady islands....

BALTIMORE, April 6 (UPI) -- Protection of the Antarctic region against increased tourism is the goal of a proposal to the Antarctic Treaty, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said. "Strengthening environmental regulation is especially as important as tourism to the Antarctica increases," Clinton said Monday during the 32nd Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting in Baltimore. "The United States is concerned about the safety of the tourists and the suitability of the ships that make the journey south. " The U.S. resolution would place limits on landings from ships with large numbers of tourists, as well as list new requirements for...

WASHINGTON -- The Obama administration is pushing to protect Antarctica's fragile environment by imposing mandatory limits on the size of cruise ships sailing there and the number of passengers they bring ashore.

An ice bridge linking a shelf of ice the size of Jamaica to two islands in Antarctica has snapped. Scientists say the collapse could mean the Wilkins Ice Shelf is on the brink of breaking away, and provides further evidence or rapid change in the region. Sited on the western side of the Antarctic Peninsula, the Wilkins shelf has been retreating since the 1990s. Researchers regarded the ice bridge as an important barrier, holding the remnant shelf structure in place.

OSLO: Jagged mountains the size of the Alps have been found entombed in Antarctica’s ice, giving new clues about the vast ice sheet that will raise world sea levels if even a fraction of it melts, scientists said. Using radar and gravity sensors, the experts made the first detailed maps of the Gamburtsev subglacial mountains, originally detected by Russian scientists 50 years ago at the heart of the East Antarctic ice sheet. “The surprising thing was that not only is this mountain range the size of the Alps, but it looks quite similar to the (European) Alps, with high peaks...

All passengers on board a cruise ship that ran aground in Antarctica were transferred Wednesday to a sister ship... Passengers from the Ocean Nova were transferred to the Clipper Adventurer, also operated by Quark Expeditions, to be carried to Ushuaia, Argentina, the city closest to Antarctica. The Ocean Nova went aground Tuesday in Marguerite Bay near San Martin, an Argentinian base in Antarctica. The vessel was carrying 106 people, 65 passengers and 41 crew, Quark said. Divers from a Spanish naval vessel found no visible damage during a preliminary inspection ...

Just about every major outlet has jumped on the news: Antarctica is warming up. Most previous science had indicated that, despite a warming of global temperatures, readings from Antarctica were either staying the same or even going down. The problem with Antarctic temperature measurement is that all but three longstanding weather stations are on or very near the coast. Antarctica is a big place, about one-and-a-half times the size of the US. Imagine trying to infer our national temperature only with stations along the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, plus three others in the interior. Eric Steig, from University of Washington,...

Yet another example of the ‘research’ masquerading as science that is used to reinforce the man-made global warming fraud. One of the difficulties the green zealots have had is that Antarctica has been not warming but cooling, with the extent of its ice reaching record levels. A few weeks ago, a study led by Professor Eric Steig caused some excitement by claiming that actually West Antarctica was warming so much that it more than made up for the cooling in East Antarctica. Warning bells should have sounded when Steig said What we did is interpolate carefully instead of just using...

How does a new Nature study conclude that Antarctica is warming when actual temperature readings show it is not? By Lawrence Solomon For two decades now, those predicting climate-change catastrophe have been frustrated by skeptics who ask, “If carbon dioxide is warming the planet, why does the data show Antarctica to be cooling?” Until last week, the doomsayers had all manner of complicated explanations but no slam dunk answer. Now, thanks to a new study published last week in Nature magazine, the doomsayers obtained the answer they sought — proof that any fool can understand. The bottom line: Antarctica is in...

Thanks to Powerline for this update. It seems the MSM jumps on anything it can to support its dying case for Climate Change, nee Man-Made Global Warming. As if the name difference didn't tell us all we needed to know anyway. A couple days ago, the MSM, including FOX News, jumped on a story about the Antarctica warming. Now a guy that actually knows the weather stations explains why the report is wrong. Will the MSM correct itself? Will Algore preach te wrong report to the Senate?

In the first major initiative of his presidency, President Barack Obama today dispatched Vice President Joe Biden on what he called “an important and special mission” to Antarctica.

For years Antarctica was a blot on the reputation of the Global warming nuts. You see the damned continent just REFUSED to get warmer. The Fact is satellite evidence has shown that the vast mass of Antarctica, has been getting colder over the past 30 years. Last year's sea-ice cover was 30 per cent above average. All that changed earlier this week: The continent of Antarctica is warming up in step with the rest of the world, according to a new analysis. Scientists say data from satellites and weather stations indicate a warming of about 0.6C over the last 50...

Ocean heat content revised still shows cooling My recent story generated a lot of interest and debate. Here is final thought about that report, and contrasting warming and cooling studies about Antarctica. On a side note, I also posted a clip from 20/20 with John Stossel interviewing Scientists who debate global warming and the personal attacks that have faced. Find it here or at the bottom of this post. The comments represent less than 1% of the thousands of folks who visited. So I wanted to do a quick follow up before pushing forward. I had only introduced the...

Ringing out the old 31 Dec. 2008 This will be a short post. It's New Year's Eve. Today started windy. When I woke up I could hear the wind flapping the tent sides and the hiss of snow blowing against the tent. I knew we would not start work early so I stayed in the sleeping bag. The wind died down just a little during the morning, so we decided to try foot-searching a moraine after lunch. Walking around, rather than searching from a ski-doo, would help keep us warm while we were outside. That is the theory. We kept...

Editor's note: Marine geophysicist Robin Bell is leading an expedition to Antarctica to explore a mysterious mountain range beneath the ice sheet. Following is the fifteenth of her updates on the effort as part of ScientificAmerican.com's in-depth report on the "Future of the Poles." AGAP South Camp, ANTARCTICA —Yesterday morning the sky at the South Pole had the kind of ‘iffy’ look that made my stomach turn. Instead of the normal brilliant blue, there were clouds on the horizon and sparkling ice crystals blowing past in the air. Allan Meredith, chief pilot for the British Antarctic Survey, was set to...

More ghosts per capita than any continent Does Antarctica have the most ghosts of any continent? On a per capita basis, the answer is yes. While the South Pole and environs doesn’t have a permanent population, there are on average 2,500 people living there during the year -- approximately 4000 in summer and 1000 incredibly hardy ones in winter (source). While no complete necrologies exists for the Antarctic, at least 268 people have died there since humanity first decided it was a good place to visit. So if the ghosts divvie the work evenly, each one only has to haunt...

Chilean naval crews are waiting for the high tide on Monday to try to free a cruise ship stranded in Antarctica, after the first attempt to refloat the vessel was unsuccessful. Attempts on Sunday to free the MV Ushuaia, which is stuck on the rock, tilted to one side and leaking fuel, proved to be more difficult than first thought. Eleven Australians were among 120 people on board the ship who had to be evacuated to Argentina after the vessel was damaged when it hit a rock on Thursday. US-based International Association of Antarctic Tour Operators executive director, Steve Wellmeier,...

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina – The Argentine navy says a cruise ship carrying 122 people is adrift and taking on water in Antarctica but is no danger of sinking. .. 89 passengers .. 33 crew .. the "Ushuaia."

HICKAM AIR FORCE BASE, Hawaii, Nov. 6, 2008 – A combined U.S. and Australian team evacuated an Australian civilian in Antarctica to a hospital in Hobart, Australia, yesterday. An LC-130 Hercules sits on an improvised ice runway at Davis Station, Antarctica, Nov. 3, 2008. A U.S. and Australian medical team moved an injured Australian civilian aboard the aircraft from the camp to a hospital in Hobart, Australia. The mission was flown as part of Operation Deep Freeze, commanded by U.S. Pacific Command's Joint Task Force Support Forces Antarctica at Hickam Air Force Base, Hawaii. Courtesy photo   (Click photo for...

An Antarctic mountain range that rivals the Alps in elevation will be probed this month by an expedition of scientists using airborne radar and other Information Age tools to virtually "peel away" more than 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) of ice covering the peaks. One of the mysteries of the mountain range is that current evidence suggests that it "shouldn't be there" at all. The researchers hope to find answers there to some basic questions about the nature of the southernmost continent, including the massive East Antarctic Ice Sheet. For instance, it is unclear how Antarctica came to be ice-covered in...

Australia will join five other countries in what scientists describe as one of the most ambitious explorations of the Antarctic. Buried deep beneath the Antarctic continent is a mountain range of such a huge scale that scientists are almost in awe of what they are about to do. "It's really a bit like going to Mars really, you know you need years and years of preparations in order to face such a huge challenge," Dr Fausto Ferraccioli, from the British Antarctic Survey, said. "By pooling international resources we can reach areas of Antarctica which we could not reach before." Unlocking...

Scientists Debate Moving Polar Bears to Antarctica as Arctic MeltsJuly 24, 2008 Scientists are obviously reaching a point of true desperation. While the world still debates whether climate change is even real (eye roll), the scientific community is coming back to an idea that was once considered wrongheaded and dangerous: moving species to new areas of the world as their natural habitats become inhabitable. First up: moving the polar bears to the other side of the globe. From Wired: Caught between climate change and human pressure, species are going extinct 100 times faster than at any point in human history....

A college student's new discovery of fossils collected in the East Antarctic suggests that the frozen polar cap was once a much balmier place. The well-preserved fossils of ostracods, a type of small crustaceans, came from the Dry Valleys region of Antarctica's Transantarctic Mountains and date from about 14 million years ago. The fossils were a rare find, showing all of the ostracods' soft anatomy in 3-D. The fossils were discovered by Richard Thommasson during screening of the sediment in research team member Allan Ashworth's lab at North Dakota State University. Because ostracods couldn't survive in the current Antarctic climate,...

Some facts you're not likely to hear about from the mainstream media. By Joe D’Aleo. The Antarctic set a new record (since records began in 1979) for sea ice extent at the end of last winter. It stayed well above the normal through the summer with icemelt 40% below the normal. As a new height of irony and hype, the media made a big deal about a fracture of a small part of the Wilkins ice sheet in late February (160 square miles of the 6 million square mile Antarctic ice sheet (0.0027% of the total). Media headlines blared: Bye-bye,...

WELLINGTON (Reuters) - One of the last shipments to a U.S. research base in Antarctica before the onset of winter darkness was a year's supply of condoms, a New Zealand newspaper reported on Monday. Bill Henriksen, the manager of the McMurdo base station, said nearly 16,500 condoms were delivered last month and would be made available, free of charge, to staff throughout the year to avoid the potential embarrassment of having to buy them. The base only has a skeleton staff through the long winter. "Since everybody knows everyone, it becomes a little bit uncomfortable," Henriksen told the Southland Times...

Cat-sized reptiles once roamed what is now the icebox of Antarctica, snuggling up in burrows and peeping above ground to snag plant roots and insects. The evidence for this scenario comes from preserved burrow casts discovered in the Transantarctic Mountains, which extend 3,000 miles (4,800 km) across the polar continent and contain layers of rock dating back 400 million years. "We've got good evidence that these burrows were made by land-dwelling animals rather than crayfish," said lead researcher Christian Sidor, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Washington and curator at UW's Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture. Ancient...

Washington, May 27 : A new study by scientists has suggested that the melting of the Antarctic glaciers might be leading to the release of large amounts of the banned pesticide DDT, which is contaminating the environment in Antarctica. In the study, scientist Heidi N. Geisz and colleagues estimate that up to 2.0 - 8.8 pounds of DDT are released into coastal waters annually along the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet from glacial meltwater. The researchers point out that DDT reaches Antarctica by long-range atmospheric transport in snow, and then gets concentrated in the food chain. DDT has been banned in...

Editor's Note: This story embargoed for release until 2 pm ET Wednesday, October 17, 2001, to coincide with publication in the journal Nature.) COLUMBUS, Ohio - An international team of scientists reported this week that a rock core drilled from the seafloor off the coast of Antarctica is the first to show cyclic climate changes in polar regions that are linked to cores taken from the ocean bottom in both temperate and tropical zones. These records show ice sheet advances and retreats that match Milankovitch cycles - variations in the Earth's orbit around the sun, in the tilt of the ...

There was just a very short blurb about finding evidence of settlements in Antarctica, along with pictures of tools, that indicate man was there 2-300 years before it was officially discovered in the 1800's. I am searching for links but haven't found any yet.

Surface snowmelt in Antarctica in 2008, as derived from spaceborne passive microwave observations at 19.35 gigahertz, was 40% below the average of the period 1987–2007. The melting index (MI, a measure of where melting occurred and for how long) in 2008 was the second-smallest value in the 1987–2008 period, with 3,465,625 square kilometers times days (km2 × days) against the average value of 8,407,531 km2 × days (Figure 1a). Melt extent (ME, the extent of the area subject to melting) in 2008 set a new minimum with 297,500 square kilometers, against an average value of approximately 861,812 square kilometers......

Cosmologists Probe Mystery Of Dark Energy With South Pole Telescope ScienceDaily (Apr. 3, 2008) — Something is pulling the universe apart. What is it, and where will it take us from here? Scientists at the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics, University of Chicago, seek answers to those questions with the newly-commissioned South Pole Telescope. Frigid and bone-dry, with six straight months of night each year, the South Pole is a forbidding place to live or work. But for largely the same reasons, it’s one of the best spots on the planet for surveying the faint cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation...

Megaherbs flourished in Antarctica Wednesday, 19 March 2008 Stephen Pincock, ABC This daisy-like 'megaherb' may have once grown in Antarctica 2 million years ago before spreading north when the last ice age started (Source: David Norton) Giant flowers found on Australia and New Zealand's sub-Antarctic islands are probably survivors of lush forests that covered Antarctica before the beginning of the last ice age nearly 2 million years ago, scientists say. The flowers, known to researchers as megaherbs, grow abundantly on the tiny windswept islands such as the Snares, Auckland and Campbell island groups. Dr Steve Wagstaff from Landcare Research in...

Satellite images show the runaway disintegration of a 160-square-mile chunk in western Antarctica, which started Feb. 28. It was the edge of the Wilkins ice shelf and has been there for hundreds, maybe 1,500 years. This is the result of global warming, said British Antarctic Survey scientist David Vaughan. Because scientists noticed satellite images within hours, they diverted satellite cameras and even flew an airplane over the ongoing collapse for rare pictures and video. "It's an event we don't get to see very often," said Ted Scambos, lead scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo....

Scientists find giant marine life in Antarctic sea survey By RAY LILLEY,Associated Press Writer AP - Friday, March 21 WELLINGTON, New Zealand - Scientists found that some marine life doesn't come small in Antarctic waters, with giant-sized specimens surprising researchers during a major survey of New Zealand's Antarctic seas that ended this week. ADVERTISEMENT Huge sea snails, jellyfish with tentacles up to 4 meters (yards) long and starfish the size of big food platters were some of the species found during research vessel Tangaroa's 50-day, 3,200-kilometer (2,000-mile) voyage in the Ross Sea, New Zealand marine scientist Don Robertson said. "I...

Chilean President Michelle Bachelet officially re-opened on Wednesday the Arturo Prat base in Antarctica which was the first to be established by the Chilean Navy in 1947 but was later closed in 2004. The event was described in Chile as a reaffirmation of the country’s rights over Antarctica. The eleven permanent members of the base, which is being refurbished --and eleven degrees below zero--, received President Bachelet, Defence minister Jose Goñi and the Commander of the Navy Admiral Rodolfo Codina. “This base is going to guarantee Chilean rights and territorial integrity, which is undoubtedly the duty of the Armed Forces”,...

Mysterious Meteorites Stymie Scientists Anne Minard for National Geographic NewsMarch 12, 2008 A pair of mysterious meteorites discovered in Antarctica is baffling scientists who are struggling to determine the origin of the space rocks. The meteorites, dubbed GRA 06128 and GRA 06129, were found in the Graves Nunataks region of Antarctica in 2006 (see an interactive map of Antarctica). The rocks were oddly rusty and salty and smelled like rotten eggs, its discoverers said. Initially, a team at the University of New Mexico (UNM) caused a stir when its analysis hinted that the pair may hail from Venus or the...

MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay - Venezuelan scientists and military officers reached the Antarctica after a 15-day trip, opening the South American nation's first expedition to the frozen continent, officials said Saturday. The Venezuelans made the trip on an Uruguayan naval research ship, reflecting warm ties between the nations' leftist governments. President Tabare Vazquez has been criticized by his opponents for allowing Venezuelans aboard the Uruguayan vessel Oyarvide. The ship concluded a voyage of 3,700 kilometers (2,300 miles) on Friday but high winds and choppy seas prevented the full delegation from immediately disembarking at Uruguay's General Artigas Antarctic base, said Uruguayan army Maj....