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(CNN) -- A Chinese ship trying to reach a trapped expedition vessel in Antarctica has now become hampered by ice itself. The Chinese icebreaker Xue Long, or Snow Dragon, was just six nautical miles away from the Russian-flagged vessel when it became obstructed by heavy ice. Even the icebreaker could not break through the floe, the Australian Maritime Safety Authority said Saturday. "We have been waiting for better weather and ice conditions since last night," Zhao Yanping, second captain of the Xue Long, told CNN. "Xue Long is not moving forward but we're not stuck." The Chinese crew was hoping...

Somewhere far, far to the south where it is summer, a group of global warming scientists are trapped in the Antarctic ice. If you missed the irony of that situation, it is because much of the mainstream media has glossed over that rather inconvenient irony. As an example here is an Associated Press story that avoids mentioning the real mission of the scientists aboard the icebound Russian ship: The Snow Dragon icebreaker came within 7 miles (11 kilometers) of the Russian ship MV Akademik Shokalskiy, which has been stuck since Christmas Eve, but had to retreat after the ice became...

Almost one hundred years after a group of explorers set out across the frozen landscape of Antarctica to set up supply depots for famed explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton, a box of 22 never-before-seen exposed but unprocessed negatives taken by the group’s photographer has been unearthed in one of those shacks, preserved in a block of ice.

Explanation: How cold can it get on Earth? In the interior of the Antarctica, a record low temperature of -93.2 °C (-135.8 °F) has been recorded. This is about 25 °C (45 °F) colder than the coldest lows noted for any place humans live permanently. The record temperature occurred in 2010 August -- winter in Antarctica -- and was found by scientists sifting through decades of climate data taken by Earth-orbiting satellites. The coldest spots were found near peaks because higher air is generally colder, although specifically in depressions near these peaks because relatively dense cold air settled there and...

Junk Science: Researchers have discovered a chain of smoldering active volcanoes under the West Antarctic ice sheet — which happens to be the ice sheet that climate hysterics say is proof of man-caused global warming. The 2004 science fiction movie "The Day After Tomorrow" — and the operative word here is "fiction" — opened with a portion of the West Antarctic ice sheet shearing off as a prelude to planetary doom. But if the researchers depicted in the film had looked deep into the widening crevice, they might have noticed a string of active volcanoes lurking under nearly a mile...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Feeling chilly? Here's cold comfort: You could be in East Antarctica which new data says set a record for "soul-crushing" cold. Try 135.8 degrees Fahrenheit below zero; that's 93.2 degrees below zero Celsius, which sounds only slightly toastier. Better yet, don't try it. That's so cold scientists say it hurts to breathe.

Poor Global Warming just can’t catch a break. Planetary temperatures aren’t cooperating, nor is the rate of sea level rise, and now even West Antarctica seems to be gouging James Hansen in the eye.

Seismologists working in a mountainous area of Marie Byrd Land in western Antarctica detected a swarm of low-magnitude earthquakes in 2010 and 2011 similar to those that can precede volcanic eruptions... and the characteristics and depth of the seismic events are consistent with those found in volcanic areas of Alaska’s Aleutian Islands, the Pacific Northest, Hawaii and Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines... The tight focus of the 1,370 tremors and their deep, long-period waves helped researchers rule out ice quakes, glacial motion or tectonic activity as causes. So, too, did their apparent depth: At 15-25 miles beneath the sub-glacial surface,...

There is a five-story, blood-red waterfall pouring slowly from the Taylor Glacier in Antarctica's McMurdo Dry Valley. Its back story, at Atlas Obscura, is simply remarkable: Roughly 2 million years ago, the Taylor Glacier sealed beneath it a small body of water which contained an ancient community of microbes. Trapped below a thick layer of ice, they have remained there ever since, isolated inside a natural time capsule. Evolving independently of the rest of the living world, these microbes exist without heat, light, or oxygen, and are essentially the definition of "primordial ooze." The trapped lake has very high salinity...

McMurdo Station, Antarctica (AP) -- The Republican's shutdown of the US Federal Government claimed another casualty today when scientists announced that Antarctica will be closed until further notice. Although the US government does not technically own the world's Southernmost land mass, scientists funded by Federal tax dollars have had a presence on the continent for over fifty years. And with the Federal government shut down, that means the base, and all of the land it sits on, must remain closed until a new budget resolution is passed. "It seems harsh," said Dr. Will Moresby, director of McMurdo Station on the...

Earth has gained 19,000 Manhattans of sea ice since this date last year, the largest increase on record. There is more sea ice now than there was on this date in 2002.

Scientists have long tried to figure out what causes the ebb and flow of ice ages. New data suggests a novel explanation for why the mile-thick blankets of ice retreat so quickly: They become too heavy. For the last 900,000 years, mile-thick ice sheets have waxed and waned in the Northern Hemisphere with remarkable regularity – building over periods of about 100,000 years and retreating in the space of only a few thousand years, only to repeat the cycle. Now, a team of scientists from Japan, the US, and Switzerland suggests that the North American continent is the breeding ground...

Working on some area and latitude calculations for sea ice. many hundreds of on-line references report that the Antarctic continent is 14,000,000 square kilometers: A nice, convenient even round number. That's obviously always been rounded off as one source copies from everybody, or just never measured accurately. Neither seems correct. the NSIRDC tracks sea ice, and they have explicitly written me that their "Antarctic Sea Ice"totals do NOT include the permanent ice shelves around many areas of that continent. Fine, no problem: and it even makes sense: Why should a federal agency track "permanent sea shelves" when they can get...

Global warming five million years ago may have caused parts of Antarctica's large ice sheets to melt and sea levels to rise by approximately 20 metres, scientists report today in the journal Nature Geoscience. The researchers, from Imperial College London, and their academic partners studied mud samples to learn about ancient melting of the East Antarctic ice sheet. They discovered that melting took place repeatedly between five and three million years ago, during a geological period called Pliocene Epoch, which may have caused sea levels to rise approximately ten metres.

A massive iceberg, larger than the city of Chicago, broke off of Antarctica's Pine Island Glacier on Monday (July 8), and is now floating freely in the Amundsen Sea, according to a team of German scientists. The newborn iceberg measures about 278 square miles (720 square kilometers), and was seen by TerraSAR-X, an earth-observing satellite operated by the German Space Agency (DLR). Scientists with NASA's Operation IceBridgefirst discovered a giant crack in the Pine Island Glacier in October 2011, as they were flying over and surveying the sprawling ice sheet. At that time, the fissure spanned about 15 miles (24...

Pine Island Glacier (PIG), the longest and fastest flowing glacier in the Antarctic, has spawned a huge iceberg. The block measures about 720 sq km in area - roughly eight times the size of Manhattan Island in New York. Scientists have been waiting for the PIG to calve since October 2011 when they first noticed a spectacular crack spreading across its surface. Confirmation that the fissure had extended the full width of the glacier was obtained on Monday. It was seen by the German TerraSAR-X satellite. This carries a radar instrument that can detect the surface of the ice stream...

Colored polygons represent different geological units that have been mapped (and inferred) by geologists over many years. These geological units formed before the continents broke apart, so we can use their position to put the "jigsaw pieces" back together again. Many other reconstructions do not use the geological boundaries to match the continental "jigsaw pieces" back together - so they don't align properly. Courtesy of University of Royal Holloway London A new study published in the journal Gondwana Research, has revealed the past position of the Australian, Antarctic and Indian tectonic plates, demonstrating how they formed the supercontinent Gondwana 165...

Analysis of ice cores obtained from the basin of Lake Vostok, the subglacial lake that Russian scientists drilled down to in 2012, have revealed DNA from an estimated 3,507 organisms. While the majority were found to be bacteria, many of which were new to science, there were also other single celled organisms and multicellular organisms found, including from fungi. The diversity of life from the lake has surprised scientists as many had thought the lake would be sterile due to the extreme conditions. Lake Vostok was first covered by ice more than 15 million years ago and is now buried...

Six billion tonnes of water may have been dumped into the ocean all at once after an underground Antarctic lake overtopped, causing the ice sheet above it to slump into a giant 260 square-kilometre crater.

The Antarctic continent is a frozen landscape of snow and sleet, but a new map from NASA exposes what the region would look like if all the ice were to disappear.