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Kerry to Travel to Antarctica, State Dept Grilled Over Why November 4, 2016 4:55 pm After announcing that Secretary of State John Kerry will be traveling to Antarctica, State Department spokesman John Kirby was grilled over why Kerry was traveling there and the trip’s cost to taxpayers. Kerry will travel to a research station at the South Pole in a trip that begins Monday. Kirby said the foreign minister of New Zealand would not be accompanying Kerry when asked by reporters. Flights to the South Pole normally stop in New Zealand first. Reporters then asked what the diplomatic purpose of...

Antarctica has confounded scientists, defying the dire predictions of scientists the South Pole would shrink and exacerbate sea level rise in the coming decades. Climate models predicted Antarctic sea ice would shrink as the world warmed, and that warming would boost snowfall over the southern continent. Neither of those predictions have panned out, and now scientists say “natural variability” is overwhelming human-induced warming. “Truth is, the science is complex, and that in most places and with most events, natural variability still plays a dominant role, and undoubtedly will continue to do so,” Chip Knappenberger, a climate scientist with the libertarian...

Two small bush planes are flying to the South Pole this week to evacuate workers at the Amundsen-Scott research station — a feat rarely attempted during the middle of the Antarctic winter. Kelly Falkner, the director of polar programs for the National Science Foundation (which runs the South Pole station), said that at least one seasonal employee for contractor Lockheed Martin requires medical treatment not available at the station and needs to be flown out. A second worker may also be rescued. Falkner couldn't provide further details about the medical motivation behind the rescues for privacy reasons. "We try to...

OSLO (Reuters) - A persistent chill in the ocean off Antarctica that defies the global warming blamed for melting Arctic ice at the other end of the planet is caused by cold waters welling up from the depths after hundreds of years, scientists said on Monday. The Southern Ocean off Antarctica may be among the last places on Earth to feel the impact of man-made climate change, with a lag of centuries to affect waters emerging from up to 5,000 meters (16,000 ft) deep, the U.S. study said. Many people who doubt mainstream scientific findings that human use of fossil...

In fact, deep ocean circulation slowed down to such an extent that the heavy, saline water mass below a depth of 2000 metres was not in contact with the surface for almost 3000 years. "During this time, so much bound carbon in the form of animal and algae remains trickled down from the more intermixed sea surface into the deep water layer that we were able to identify it as the major carbon reservoir that we have looked for so intensively," says Thomas Ronge. The data also showed that the already old age of the water masses was artificially increased...

In the new research, researchers took aircraft-based measurements across the vastness of Totten Glacier, and the extremely deep and thick ice canyons behind it — which scientists call “subglacial basins” — in order to understand a critical yet invisible feature: precisely what the layers of rock beneath the ice are really like. This, in turn, provides a clue to the behavior of this region in past warm eras. When marine-based glaciers move back and forth across a seascape repeatedly, they grind against the seafloor and dig up piles of looser sediment, such as sandstone, depositing them in a new location....

Paris (AFP) - A rapidly melting glacier atop East Antarctica is on track to lift oceans at least two metres, and could soon pass a "tipping point" of no return, researchers said Wednesday. To date, scientists have mostly worried about the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets as dangerous drivers of sea level rise. But the new study, following up on earlier work by the same team, has identified a third major threat to hundreds of millions of people living in coastal areas around the world. "I predict that before the end of the century the great global cities of...

The wreckage of the Endeavour, the storied British ship that 18th-century explorer Captain James Cook sailed through the uncharted South Pacific, may lie a few hundred feet off Rhode Island’s coast in Newport Harbor, researchers said Wednesday. The 105-foot (32-meter) long, three-masted bark, later renamed the Lord Sandwich, had been hired out by the British Royal Navy as a troop transport when it was one of 13 ships deliberately sunk by the British in 1778 in an effort to blockade the harbor.

Crystal balls at the South Pole. (Photo: Eli Duke/CC BY-SA 2.0)It sounds like the premise for a riddle: At the South Pole are two crystal balls that provides unfailingly accurate information—not about the future, but about the past. This is no trick. It's just meteorology. The dual glass spheres at the South Pole are Campbell-Stokes sunshine recorders, orbs that capture the number of hours of direct sunlight each day, as well as its intensity.Sunshine recorders first came about in the 1850s, thanks to John Francis Campbell—the Campbell in Campbell-Stokes. Around 1853, Campbell, a Scottish author who focused on Celtic folklore, developed a desire to quantify...

Fourteen million years ago the now lifeless valleys were tundra, similar to parts of Alaska, Canada and Siberia — cold but able to support life, researchers report. The moss was essentially freeze dried, he said. Unlike fossils, where minerals replace soft materials, the moss tissues were still there, he said. "The really cool thing is that all the details are still there," even though the plant has been dead for 14 million years. "These are actually the plant tissues themselves." ==================================================== And they redicule me for believing in the bible ... 14 million years, ya right

Moss Landing researchers reveal iron as key to climate change -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- PRESS RELEASE APRIL 15, 2004 EMBARGOED: Not for release until Thursday, 15 April 2004 at 14:00 Eastern Time MOSS LANDING RESEARCHERS REVEAL IRON AS KEY TO CLIMATE CHANGE MOSS LANDING, California - A remarkable expedition to the waters of Antarctica reveals that iron supply to the Southern Ocean may have controlled Earth's climate during past ice ages. A multi-institutional group of scientists, led by Dr. Kenneth Coale of Moss Landing Marine Laboratories (MLML) and Dr. Ken Johnson of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI), fertilized two key areas...

LINK West Antartic Ice Sheet began melting away 10,000 years ago: study WASHINGTON (AFP) Jan 04, 2003 The West Antartic Ice Sheet began melting away some 10,000 years ago and should continue to shrink, according to a study released Friday. A team of researchers at the University of Washington in Seattle found that rock fragments were left behind by glaciers that disappeared over 10,000 years ago, according to the study out Friday in the latest issue of Science. "This work establishes a background pattern of steady decline in the West Antarctic ice sheet," said John Stone, an associate professor of...

Everything about tardigrades sounds like a riddle: What creature can survive both freezing and boiling temperatures; you can't see it, but it's everywhere; it can survive outer space; and after being dried up for years, it can reanimate in water within a few minutes? The answer is just as puzzling: tardigrades, which are also called "water bears" or "moss piglets," are aquatic, microscopic invertebrates that have recently captivated evolutionary biologists and science enthusiasts alike for their unique ability to withstand extreme conditions. There is photographic evidence too that tardigrades are adorable. Now, researchers at the University of North Carolina at...

Adam Korbitz writes "New Scientist and Science Daily are reporting the results of an intriguing experiment in which scientists launched tardigrades or 'water bears' — tiny invertebrates about one millimeter long — into space onboard the European Space Agency's FOTON-M3 spacecraft. After 10 days in the vacuum of space, the satellite returned to Earth and the tardigrades were recovered. The tardigrades survived the vacuum just fine, but exposure to the Sun's ultraviolet radiation proved deadly for most of the water bears. However, some did survive. The tardigrades are the first animals to have survived such an experiment, a feat previously...

We’ve all found wrapped-but-unlabeled steaks that have been buried in a deep, dark crevice of a freezer for an unknown number of years and have attempted to revive them to a state where they can be grilled and served with copious amounts of steak sauce. Scientists with the British Antarctic Survey and the University of Reading would scoff at this trivial effort. They dug into the Antarctic permafrost and extracted frozen moss that they determined, using carbon dating, to have been frozen for over 1500 years. The icy moss was placed in an incubator, given an ideal environment and, within...

Scientists are warning that the West Antarctic ice sheet could collapse, potentially causing sea levels to rise more than 49 feet by 2500. The study published in the journal Nature this week, cites the impact of greenhouse gas emissions over the coming decades. Collapsing Antarctic ice could cause sea levels to rise more than 3 feet by 2100, say co-authors Rob DeConto, a geoscientist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and David Pollard, a palaeoclimatologist at Pennsylvania State University in University Park. If emissions continue unabated, the scientists warn, atmospheric warming will soon become a “dominant driver” of ice loss,...

Ancient Cataclysm Rearranged Pacific Map, Study Says Julian Ryall for National Geographic NewsOctober 24, 2007 A cataclysm 50 million years ago changed the face of the planet from the Hawaiian Islands to Antarctica, according to new research. The collapse of an underwater mountain range in the Pacific Ocean turned Australia into a warm and sunny continent instead of a snowbound wasteland and created some of the islands that dot the South Pacific today. "We have found that the destruction of an entire mid-ocean ridge, known as the Izanagi Ridge, initiated a chain reaction of geological events," said Joanne Whittaker, a...

Antarctica is known for frigid temperatures, parading penguins and now... being “the world’s first LGBT-friendly continent”?That’s right — at least if Planting Peace has anything to say about it.The non-profit advocacy organization, which created the pro-queer rainbow Equality House adjacent to the Westboro Baptist Church compound in Topeka, Kansas, recently traveled across Antarctica carrying a Pride flag in a symbolic effort to declare full human rights for all lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people living in or visiting Antartica. The gesture is also meant to raise awareness about securing equality for queer people on a global level.

WASHINGTON (AFP) - A meteor's roaring crash into Antarctica -- larger and earlier than the impact that killed the dinosaurs -- caused the biggest mass extinction in Earth's history and likely spawned the Australian continent, scientists said. Ohio State University scientists said the 483-kilometer-wide (300-mile-wide) crater is now hidden more than 1.6 kilometers (one mile) beneath the East Antarctic Ice Sheet. "Gravity measurements that reveal its existence suggest that it could date back about 250 million years -- the time of the Permian-Triassic extinction, when almost all animal life on Earth died out," the university said in a statement Thursday....

Two hundred and fifty million years ago, the majority of life on earth may have suffocated. The "Great Dying," a catastrophic event that killed 90 percent of Earth's marine life and 75 percent of the life on land, was caused by a combination of warmer temperatures and lower oxygen levels, according to a recent study by researchers at the University of Washington. In other words, the extinction was precipitated by global warming, rather than an asteroid collision, the reigning theory. The findings, to be published in the magazine Science, are largely based on comparisons of fossils found in South Africa's...