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The cold, dry atmosphere above the South Pole will allow the SPT to more easily detect the CMB (cosmic microwave background) radiation, the afterglow of the big bang, with minimal interference from water vapor. On the electromagnetic spectrum, the CMB falls somewhere between heat radiation and radio waves. The CMB is largely uniform, but it contains tiny ripples of varying density and temperature. These ripples reflect the seeds that, through gravitational attraction, grew into the galaxies and galaxy clusters visible to astronomers in the sky today. The SPT's first key science project will be to study small variations in the...

Kulesa and his team communicate with the telescope remotely via satellite, sending it new orders and instructions throughout the year, and downloading new data. They also keep a watchful eye on their experiment through a webcam, which sends image updates from roughly 9,000 miles away roughly every hour. Why Antarctica, though? Even the smallest amount of water vapor in Earth's atmosphere absorbs terahertz-frequency light from space before it reaches a telescope on Earth... From Tucson, Kulesa said, it's about 5-10 millimeters deep in winter and up to 40 millimeters deep during monsoon season in summer. At the telescope site in...

Russian scientists said March 7 that they might have found a new form of bacterial life that had been entombed in a lake deep under Antarctica for millions of years. But Saturday AFP reported that the Russian scientists retracted the statement.

Last year, the team drilled through almost 4km (2.34 miles) of ice to reach the lake and retrieve samples. Vostok is thought to have been cut off from the surface for millions of years. This has raised the possibility that such isolated bodies of water might host microbial life forms new to science. "After putting aside all possible elements of contamination, DNA was found that did not coincide with any of the well-known types in the global database," said Sergei Bulat, of the genetics laboratory at the St Petersburg Institute of Nuclear Physics. "We are calling this life form unclassified...

Russian scientists believe they have found a wholly new type of bacteria in the mysterious subglacial Lake Vostok in Antarctica, the RIA Novosti news agency reported on Thursday. The samples obtained from the underground lake in May 2012 contained a bacteria which bore no resemblance to existing types, said Sergei Bulat of the genetics laboratory at the Saint Petersburg Institute of Nuclear Physics. "After putting aside all possible elements of contamination, DNA was found that did not coincide with any of the well-known types in the global database," he said. "We are calling this life form unclassified and unidentified," he...

SCOTTBASE, Antarctica (AP) — Talk about whisky on ice: Three bottles of rare, 19th century Scotch found beneath the floor boards of Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackelton's abandoned expedition base were returned to the polar continent Saturday after a distiller flew them to Scotland to recreate the long-lost recipe. But not even New Zealand Prime Minister John Key, who personally returned the stash, got a taste of the contents of the bottles of Mackinlay's whisky, which were rediscovered 102 years after the explorer was forced to leave them behind. "I think we're all tempted to crack it open and have a...

http://www.spacedaily.com/news/icecores-02a.html Antarctic Ice Drilling Reaches Milestone Paris - Jan 28, 2002 European scientists have reached the two-thirds mark in one of the most ambitious ice-core projects, a scheme to drill through more than three kilometers (two miles) of Antarctic ice sheet and strike bedrock. A 22-member team of scientists and drillers from the European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica (EPICA) has reached exactly 2,002 metres (6,506 feet), the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) said. Battling plunging temperatures as the brief Antarctic summer draws to a close, they will finish this phase of the drilling by the end of January, then ...

Ancient fungus 'revived' in lab The fungi (blue streak) were isolated from deep sea sediments Fungus from a deep-sea sediment core that is hundreds of thousands of years old can grow when placed in culture, scientists have discovered. Indian researchers say the fungi come from sediments that are between 180,000 and 430,000 years old. The finding adds to growing evidence for the impressive survival capabilities of many microorganisms. They are the oldest known fungi that will grow on a nutrient medium, the scientists say in Deep Sea Research I. The core was drilled from a depth of 5,904m in the...

Rendering of the Antarctica Gamburstev Province (AGAP) project. Credit: Zina Deretsky / NSF An international team of scientists has not only verified the existence of a mountain range that is suspected to have caused the massive East Antarctic Ice Sheet to form, but also has created a detailed picture of the rugged landscape buried under more than four kilometers (2.5 miles) of ice. "Working cooperatively in some of the harshest conditions imaginable, all the while working in temperatures that averaged -30 degrees Celsius, our seven-nation team has produced detailed images of last unexplored mountain range on Earth," said Michael Studinger,...

Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2003 January 28 The Lost World of Lake Vida Credit & Copyright: Thomas Nylen & Andrew Fountain (PSU), NASA, NSF Explanation: A lake hidden beneath 19 meters of ice has been found near the bottom of the world that might contain an ecosystem completely separate from our own. In a modern version of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's classic book Lost World, scientists are now plotting a mission to...

Russian drilling operations at Lake Vostok, Antarctica, have succeeded in collecting a long-sought core sample of water frozen into the borehole from the glacier-covered, 20 million-year-old lake they cracked into last year... In February last year the Russian drilling team cracked the ice over the surface of the lake using a melt drill for the final 40 feet. But no lake water was collected. An elaborate publicity stunt on Feb. 10, 2012, in which Prime Minister Vladimir Putin ceremoniously received a sample of what was billed as water from Lake Vostok was later explained to be water from the point...

(Phys.org)—When a huge meteor collided with Earth about 2.5 million years ago in the southern Pacific Ocean it not only likely generated a massive tsunami but also may have plunged the world into the Ice Ages, a new study suggests. A team of Australian researchers says that because the Eltanin meteor – which was up to two kilometres across - crashed into deep water, most scientists have not adequately considered either its potential for immediate catastrophic impacts on coastlines around the Pacific rim or its capacity to destabilise the entire planet's climate system. "This is the only known deep-ocean impact...

An impact event occurred at 2.15±0.5 Ma in the Bellingshausen Sea. It littered the oceanic floor with asteroidal debris. This debris is found within the Eltanin Impact Layer. Although the impact layer was known, the crater had yet to be discovered. We have found a possible source crater at 53.7S,90.1W under 5000 meters of water. The crater is 132±5km in diameter, much larger than the previously proposed size of 24 to 80 km.

25 May 10 – The revamped cap-and-trade (control-and-tax) bill that Senators Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.) and John Kerry (D-Mass.) are trying to foist on the American public is predicated on a flat-out lie. The control-and-tax proponents would have you believe that our planet has been enduring unprecedented global warming (now coyly referred to as “climate change”), but the facts do not bear that out. Facts. Oh, those damnable facts... ...You’ll see that today’s benign climate is not even close to being the warmest on record. Not even close. Temperatures have been warmer than today for almost all of the past 10,000...

Posted on August 23, 2012 by Anthony Watts From the British Antarctic SurveyWordie Ice Shelf location within Antarctic Peninsula (Photo credit: Wikipedia) New climate history adds to understanding of recent Antarctic Peninsula warmingResults published this week by a team of polar scientists from Britain, Australia and France adds a new dimension to our understanding of Antarctic Peninsula climate change and the likely causes of the break-up of its ice shelves.The first comprehensive reconstruction of a 15,000 year climate history from an ice core collected from James Ross Island in the Antarctic Peninsula region is reported this week in the journal...

Scientists drilling deep into the edge of modern Antarctica have pulled up proof that palm trees once grew there. Analyses of pollen and spores and the remains of tiny creatures have given a climatic picture of the early Eocene period, about 53 million years ago. The study in Nature suggests Antarctic winter temperatures exceeded 10C, while summers may have reached 25C. Better knowledge of past "greenhouse" conditions will enhance guesses about the effects of increasing CO2 today. The early Eocene - often referred to as the Eocene greenhouse - has been a subject of increasing interest in recent years as...

CORVALLIS, Ore. - Penguins that died 44,000 years ago in Antarctica have provided extraordinary frozen DNA samples that challenge the accuracy of traditional genetic aging measurements, and suggest those approaches have been routinely underestimating the age of many specimens by 200 to 600 percent. In other words, a biological specimen determined by traditional DNA testing to be 100,000 years old may actually be 200,000 to 600,000 years old, researchers suggest in a new report in Trends in Genetics, a professional journal. The findings raise doubts about the accuracy of many evolutionary rates based on conventional types of genetic analysis. “Some...

In a new study reported in Nature, climate scientist Rob DeConto of the University of Massachusetts Amherst and colleagues elsewhere propose a simple new mechanism to explain the source of carbon that fed a series of extreme warming events about 55 million years ago, the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), and a sequence of similar, smaller warming events afterward. "The standard hypothesis has been that the source of carbon was in the ocean, in the form of frozen methane gas in ocean-floor sediments," DeConto says. "We are instead ascribing the carbon source to the continents, in polar latitudes where permafrost can...

Russian scientists are set to pierce through Antarctica’s frozen surface to reveal the secrets of an icebound lake that has been sealed deep there for the past 15 million years. Alexei Turkeyev, head of the Russian polar Vostok Station, told Reuters by satellite phone that scientists have “only a bit left to go.” His team has been drilling for weeks in a race to reach the lake -- buried 12,000 feet beneath the polar ice cap -- before the end of the brief Antarctic summer. With the quickly returning onset of winter, scientists will be forced to leave on the...

Lake Vostok, which has been sealed off from the world for 14 million years, is about to be penetrated by a Russian drill bit. The lake, which lies four kilometres below the icy surface of Antarctica, is unique in that it's been completely isolated from the other 150 subglacial lakes on the continent for such a long time. It's also oligotropic, meaning that it's supersaturated with oxygen -- levels of the element are 50 times higher than those found in most typical freshwater lakes. Since 1990, the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute in St Petersberg in Russia has been drilling...