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Explanation: From where do these neutrinos come? The IceCube Neutrino Observatory near the South Pole of the Earth has begun to detect nearly invisible particles of very high energy. Although these rarely-interacting neutrinos pass through much of the Earth just before being detected, where they started remains a mystery. Pictured here is IceCube's Antarctic lab accompanied by a cartoon depicting long strands of detectors frozen into the crystal clear ice below. Candidate origins for these cosmic neutrinos include the violent surroundings of supermassive black holes at the centers of distant galaxies, and tremendous stellar explosions culminating in gamma ray bursts...

CNN) -- Idiotic TV shows and all the latest apps bumming you out on the 21st century? Ready for some "me time" on the world's remotest islands? Forget golden sands and swaying palms -- the reality of solitude is different as these terrifyingly distant landfalls demonstrate. ... Bear Island 400 miles off Europe's north coast Bjornoya, better known as Bear Island, is the southernmost island in the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard, 400 miles north of mainland Europe -- but only on paper, given that it's almost 150 miles south of the Norwegian island chain with which it's lumped. It's been...

Explanation: Have you ever seen a halo around the Moon? Such 22 degree rings around the Moon -- caused by ice crystals falling in the Earth's atmosphere -- are somewhat rare. OK, but have you ever seen a blue moon? Given the modern definition of blue moon -- the second full moon occurring in a calendar month -- these are also rare. What is featured above might therefore be considered doubly rare -- a halo surrounding a blue moon. The featured image was taken late last month near Zhongshan Station in Antarctica. Visible in the foreground are a power generating...

People who insist that climate change isn’t happening often try to disprove it by pointing to what they see as contradictory phenomena. One of their most visually compelling arguments has centered upon Antarctic sea ice, which expanded to reach record levels in 2014. If the planet really is warming, they ask, then shouldn’t the ice in the southern ocean be melting? But now, in a new, not-yet-published paper, James Hansen, former director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and colleagues push back even harder. They argue that the increase in Antarctic sea ice not only doesn’t refute climate...

Explanation: It has been one of the better skies of this long night. In parts of Antarctica, not only is it winter, but the Sun can spend weeks below the horizon. At China's Zhongshan Station, people sometimes venture out into the cold to photograph a spectacular night sky. The featured image from one such outing was taken in mid-July, just before the end of this polar night. Pointing up, the wide angle lens captured not only the ground at the bottom, but at the top as well. In the foreground is a colleague also taking pictures. In the distance, a...

In what may prove to be a turning point for political action on climate change, a breathtaking new study casts extreme doubt about the near-term stability of global sea levels. The study—written by James Hansen, NASA’s former lead climate scientist, and 16 co-authors, many of whom are considered among the top in their fields—concludes that glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica will melt 10 times faster than previous consensus estimates, resulting in sea level rise of at least 10 feet in as little as 50 years. The study, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, brings new importance to a feedback loop...

Diagram illustrating the inferred mode of fossilization of microorganisms in clitellate cocoons, exemplified by a common medicinal leech (reproductive stages modified from Sims). (a) Two leeches mate; (b) a cocoon is secreted from the clitellum; (c) eggs and sperm are released into the cocoon before the animal retracts and eventually deposits the sealed cocoon on a suitable substrate (d). Insets depict enlargements of the inner cocoon-wall surface showing how spermatozoa and microbes become encased in the solidifying inner cocoon wall. Credit: Biology Letters, DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2015.0431 ============================================================================================= (Phys.org)—A small team of researchers with members from institutions in Sweden, Argentina and Italy,...

Today, there are hundreds of thousands of men and women working overseas on various contracts and making good money, probably two to three times what they can make in the United States. On top of that, they may even be eligible for the foreign earned income exclusion, which in 2014 meant that the first $99,200 of their total income earned overseas was excluded from being taxed at the Federal level (it’s higher for 2015). However – and I can’t emphasize this enough – they are earning it! Naturally, the best-paying jobs are in high-threat environments such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria,...

Things without bones don’t fossilize that well. This includes sperm and worms, and most definitely worm sperm. But scientists have now discovered fossilized sperm from a worm-like creature in Antarctica that is 50 million years old, as revealed in a study published Wednesday in the journal Biology Letters.

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle states that in England 1014 AD, on the eve of St. Michael’s day (September 28, 1014) “came the great sea-flood, which spread wide over this land, and ran so far up as it never did before, overwhelming many towns, and an innumerable multitude of people.” This is clearly a reference to a tsunami similar to the one that struck Indonesia in December 2004 which killed over 250,000 people. What could have caused this tsunami? Could a meteor or comet impact in the Atlantic Ocean have been the cause? Researcher Dallas Abbott of the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory...

Nearly a kilometer below the ice scientists have found a Yellowstone-like geothermal glow that could create life-rich subglacial lakes—and lubricate Antarctic ice loss.Temperatures on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet can plummet below –50 degrees Celsius in winter. But under the ice scientists have found intense geothermal heat seeping up from Earth’s interior. The heat production that they measured is nearly four times the global average—“higher than 99 percent of all the measurements made on continents around the world,” says Andrew Fisher, a hydrogeologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who worked on the project. This excessive heat could melt...

On Sept. 19, 2014, the five-day average of Antarctic sea ice extent exceeded 20 million square kilometers for the first time since 1979, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center. The red line shows the average maximum extent from 1979-2014. Credits: NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio/Cindy Starr Sea ice surrounding Antarctica reached a new record high extent this year, covering more of the southern oceans than it has since scientists began a long-term satellite record to map sea ice extent in the late 1970s. The upward trend in the Antarctic, however, is only about a third of the...

Sometime about 220 million years ago, a meandering stream flowed here and plants grew along its banks. Something, as yet unknown, caused sediment to flood the area rapidly, which helped preserve the plants. Gulbranson splits open a grey slab of siltstone in the quarry to reveal amazingly well-preserved Triassic plant fossils, as if the leaves and stems had been freshly pressed into the rock only yesterday. "It's a mixture of plants that don't exist anymore," he says, "but we have some plants in these fossil ecosystems that we might know today, like ginkgo." On the one end are fossils from...

A report in The New York Times published on Monday revealed that the Chinese are aggressively engaged in securing the country’s energy future overseas. The People’s Republic is courting Latin American governments, securing its ties to African strongmen, is building up a military presence in the South China Sea, and has sent hundreds of advisors to the Caribbean; all in pursuit of energy security. One of the PRC’s latest targets is the frozen continent of Antarctica, where an international accord reached in 1959 prohibits mining and military activity. “But [Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to a south Australian port last...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK) Scientists have raised concerns about a large, rapidly thinning glacier in Antarctica, warning it could contribute significantly to rising sea levels. They say they've discovered two openings that could channel warm seawater to the base of the huge Totten Glacier and bring the threat of potentially disastrous melting. The glacier is bigger and thinning faster than all the others in East Antarctica. It contains enough ice to raise the global sea level by at least 11 feet (3.4 meters), according to researchers from the University of Texas at Austin who were among the authors of a new study published...

Explanation: Would you go to the end of the world to see a total eclipse of the Sun? If you did, would you be surprised to find someone else there already? In 2003, the Sun, the Moon, Antarctica, and two photographers all lined up in Antarctica during an unusual total solar eclipse. Even given the extreme location, a group of enthusiastic eclipse chasers ventured near the bottom of the world to experience the surreal momentary disappearance of the Sun behind the Moon. One of the treasures collected was the above picture -- a composite of four separate images digitally combined...

For more than 2 million years our earth has cycled in and out of Ice Ages, accompanied by massive ice sheets accumulating over polar landmasses and a cold, desert-like global climate. Although the tropics during the Ice Age were still tropical, the temperate regions and sub-tropical regions were markedly different than they are today. There is a strong correlation between temperature and CO2 concentrations during this time. Historically, glacial cycles of about 100,000 years are interupted by brief warm interglacial periods-- like the one we enjoy today. Changes in both temperatures and CO2 are considerable and generally synchronized, according to...

THE North and South Poles are “not melting”, according to a leading global warming expert. In fact, the poles are “much more stable” than climate scientists once predicted and could even be much thicker than previously thought. For years, scientists have suggested that both poles are melting at an alarming rate because of warming temperatures – dangerously raising the Earth’s sea levels while threatening the homes of Arctic and Antarctic animals. But the uncertainty surrounding climate change and the polar ice caps reached a new level this month when research suggested the ice in the Antarctic is actually growing. And...

Water is eating away at the Antarctic ice, melting it where it hits the oceans...And the melting is accelerating...Climate change has shifted the wind pattern around the continent, pushing warmer water farther north against and below the western ice sheet and the peninsula.

A World-Weary Puppy In Antarctica, Circa 1912 This poignant image (cheer up, buddy!) of a pup named "Blizzard" was taken in 1912 by Antarctic adventurer Frank Hurley, who two years later would be the photographer on Ernest Shackleton's famed Endurance Expedition. This shot is from the First Australasian Antarctic Expedition, which set out in 1911. Over a period of years, Hurley visited the frozen continent six times and came away with a trove of stirring images.