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Antarctica's ice paradox has yet another puzzling layer. Not only is the amount of sea ice increasing each year, but an underwater robot now shows the ice is also much thicker than was previously thought, a new study reports. The discovery adds to the ongoing mystery of Antarctica's expanding sea ice. According to climate models, the region's sea ice should be shrinking each year because of global warming. Instead, satellite observations show the ice is expanding, and the continent's sea ice has set new records for the past three winters. At the same time, Antarctica's ice sheet (the glacial ice...

The first time marine biologist William Haddad and his team saw a seal rape a penguin, they were shocked.By the fourth time, they were convinced this bizarre behavior was becoming a trend.For 50 years, researchers from the marine mammal program at the University of Pretoria in South Africa have been taking weekly censuses of the elephant seal population on sub-Antarctic Marion Island, more than a thousand miles south of Cape Town in the Indian Ocean. In 2006, they saw something they'd never seen before. A fur seal (not the species they were studying) mounted and appeared to mate with a...

Antarctica's ice paradox has yet another puzzling layer. Not only is the amount of sea ice increasing each year, but an underwater robot now shows the ice is also much thicker than was previously thought, a new study reports. The discovery adds to the ongoing mystery of Antarctica's expanding sea ice. According to climate models, the region's sea ice should be shrinking each year because of global warming. Instead, satellite observations show the ice is expanding, and the continent's sea ice has set new records for the past three winters...

Although not designed to map changes in Earth's gravity over time, ESA's extraordinary satellite has shown that the ice lost from West Antarctica over the last few years has left its signature. More than doubling its planned life in orbit, GOCE spent four years measuring Earth's gravity in unprecedented detail. Scientists are now armed with the most accurate gravity model ever produced. This is leading to a much better understanding of many facets of our planet – from the boundary between Earth's crust and upper mantle to the density of the upper atmosphere. The strength of gravity at Earth's surface...

Paris (AFP) - Sea levels around Antarctica have been rising a third faster than the global average, a clear sign of high meltwater runoff from the continent's icesheet, scientists said on Sunday. Satellite data from 1992 to 2011 found the sea surface around Antarctica's coast rose by around eight centimetres (3.2 inches) in total compared to a rise of six cm for the average of the world's oceans, they said. The local increase is accompanied by a fall in salinity at the sea surface, as detected by research ships. These dramatic changes can only be explained by an influx of...

An entire ecosystem has been discovered under the Antarctic, raising hopes that life could exist in extreme environments, such as other planets in the solar system. Researchers have discovered that tiny life-forms are thriving in a lake under half a mile of pack ice, even though the habitat has not seen sunlight or fresh air for a million years. The discovery has led to excitement among the scientific community who had previously theorized that microorganisms may be able to survive by evolving novel ways to generate energy. And it raises the possibility that similar life could exist on Mars or...

Antarctica, the coldest place on Earth, teems with microscopic life. Tiny organisms dwell on the ice and live inside glaciers, and now, researchers confirm, a rich microbial ecosystem persists underneath the thick ice sheet, where no sunlight has been felt for millions of years. Nearly 4,000 species of microbes inhabit Lake Whillans, which lies beneath 2,625 feet (800 meters) of ice in West Antarctica, researchers report today (Aug. 20) in the journal Nature. These are the first organisms ever retrieved from a subglacial Antarctic lake. "We found not just that things are alive, but that there's an active ecosystem," said...

British scientists are stranded after their Antarctic base lost power in the depths of winter as temperatures plummeted to a record low of minus 55C. There is no way of rescuing the 13 researchers from the Halley VI Research Station - which has been hit by a 19-hour blackout - for months until the hostile winter subsides. The British Antarctic Survey admitted it was a 'serious incident' and has suspended all experiments as the workers heat up emergency accommodation which has not been used for months. Some of the fallout from the power cut, which happened a week ago but...

Lying with Statistics: The National Climate Assessment Falsely Hypes Ice Loss in Greenland and AntarcticaPosted on July 6, 2014 by Guest Blogger by E. Calvin Beisner and J.C. KeisterHow fast are Greenland and Antarctica losing ice?If you trust the National Climate Assessment (NCA), you’ll think, “Very fast!” And that’s intentional. The aim is to provoke fear so the American public will support the Obama administration’s aim to spend $Trillions fighting global warming.Here’s how the NCA (in Appendix 4, FAQ-L) depicts the rate of loss from the ice sheets covering Greenland and Antarctica: Pretty steep declines, right? Downright scary.But if there’s any...

Antarctic sea ice has hit its second all-time record maximum this week. The new record is 2.112 million square kilometers above normal. Until the weekend just past, the previous record had been 1.840 million square kilometers above normal, a mark hit on December 20, 2007, as I reported here, and also covered in my book. Mark Serreze, director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center, responded to e-mail questions and also spoke by telephone about the new record sea ice growth in the Southern Hemisphere, indicating that, somewhat counter-intuitively, the sea ice growth was specifically due to global warming....

The Thwaites glacier is one of the most rapidly changing in Antarctica. It’s been the focus of considerable attention in recent weeks, after scientists suggested that this sector of the huge West Antarctic Ice Sheet was already on route towards collapse due to warming ocean temperatures. A major collapse of this part of the ice sheet could have dire consequences worldwide, with a global sea level rise of potentially up to 1m. Some models suggest this could take place comparatively rapidly, within a few centuries. But hidden beneath the kilometres of ice in this rapidly changing part of the...

A new study by researchers at the University of Texas, Austin found that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is collapsing due to geothermal heat, not man-made global warming.

Antarctica Rising: Uplift Rate Suppresses Conventional Geology by Brian Thomas, M.S. * Land is not supposed to rise this fast. Generations of geologists have been trained to think in terms of slow and steady processes to explain Earth features. New results show that the continental crust underlying Antarctica is rising rapidly as parts of its massive ice sheet have been melting away. This unexpected bounce might help better position the timing of similar effects that occurred in northern North America near the close of the Ice Age. Since 1995, entire ice shelves the size of cities have been falling from...

Guest essay by Larry HamlinIPCC report shows Antarctica has “negative contribution to sea level” over the 21st centuryThe recent ridiculous and scientifically flawed media claims of large Antarctica related sea level rise impacts due to “unstoppable” glacier ice loss supposedly reflected in two recent scientific papers looks even more absurd when these made up claims are compared against the Antarctica scientific findings of the UN IPCC AR5 WGI climate report.Recapping the wonderfully informative reporting by the major “news” networks on May 12 about these two Antarctica ice loss studies we have: NBC’s anchor Brian Williams asserting that these new...

According to the French, we only have 500 days to avert a worldwide climate crisis. We should all be in a panic because Antarctic glaciers might melt in the next century. The affect of this may not be felt for 1,000 years. That’s assuming any of the supposedly scientific prediction models can be believed. They’re 95% inaccurate, usually erring on the side of hysterics. Obviously we must do something, which in the leftist climate change world usually means big government action. One wonders what government will do to stop underground volcanoes from warming Antarctica. No doubt a stern lecture from...

Two teams of scientists say the long-feared collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet has begun, kicking off what they say will be a centuries-long, "unstoppable" process that could raise sea levels by as much as 15 feet. "There's been a lot of speculation about the stability of marine ice sheets, and many scientists suspected that this kind of behavior is under way," Ian Joughin, a glaciologist at the University of Washington in Seattle, said in a news release about one of the studies published Monday. "This study provides a more qualitative idea of the rates at which the collapse...

The wailing today is that the collapse of the Antarctic ice sheet has already begun. . .

On Monday, May 12, all three network evening newscasts hyped the dire consequences of a new NASA study which show that “large parts of the western Antarctica ice sheet appears to have collapsed.” ABC, CBS, and NBC hyperventilated over the report, and warned of rising sea levels in the immediate future. CBS News’ Elaine Quijano warned “A 10-foot rise in sea level would submerge tunnels and subways here in Manhattan and parts of Queens and Brooklyn. But, Scott, it would also put the entire city of Miami Beach and much of South Florida underwater.” NBC Nightly News and ABC World...

A slow-motion and irreversible collapse of a massive cluster of glaciers in Antarctica has begun, and could cause sea levels to rise across the planet by another 4 feet within 200 years, scientists concluded in two studies released Monday. Researchers had previously estimated that the cluster in the Amundsen Sea region of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet would last for thousands of years despite global climate change. But the new studies found that the loss is underway now as warming ocean water melts away the base of the ice shelf, and is occurring far more rapidly than scientists expected.

Two studies released Monday signal that five glaciers in West Antarctica are undergoing irreversible decline over the next several hundred years, signaling sea level-rise of nearly four feet. Five glaciers that feed continental ice from Antarctica into the Pacific sector of the Southern Ocean – glaciers long seen as the soft underbelly of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet – are undergoing irreversible decline, two new studies indicate.