Free Republic

Key points: “It’s now or never, if we want to limit global warming to 1.5°C,” IPCC Working Group III co-chair Jim Skea said. The 1.5 degrees Celsius goal is the aspirational temperature threshold ascribed in the landmark 2015 Paris Agreement. The IPCC’s latest report follows a series of mind-bending extreme weather events worldwide. For instance, in just the last few weeks, an ice shelf the size of New York City collapsed in East Antarctica following record high temperatures and heavy rains deluged Australia’s east coast, submerging entire towns. The IPCC has warned that about half of the world's population is...

All scientist Erin Pettit could see when she looked at the satellite photos of the ice shelf in front of the Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica was the giant crack that stretched across most of the image. Two years before, when she and her colleagues were deciding where to put their research camp, the entire floating ice shelf—a tongue of ice poking out from the enormous glacier behind it—was solid. It was plenty safe to plan a camp there, they thought...... The size of Florida, the Thwaites Glacier holds enough ice to raise global sea levels two feet. It’s also...

Scientists have found and filmed one of the greatest ever undiscovered shipwrecks 107 years after it sank. The Endurance, the lost vessel of Antarctic explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton, was found at the weekend at the bottom of the Weddell Sea. The ship was crushed by sea-ice and sank in 1915, forcing Shackleton and his men to make an astonishing escape on foot and in small boats. Video of the remains show Endurance to be in remarkable condition. Even though it has been sitting in 3km (10,000ft) of water for over a century, it looks just like it did on the...

Scientists studying ice cores packing in some 60,000 years of history have found signs of thousands of volcanic eruptions across that time, stretching back to the last Ice Age – with 25 of the eruptions larger than anything Earth has seen in the last 2,500 years. Researchers excavated the cores near both poles: in Antarctica (where 737 eruptions were logged) and Greenland (where 1,113 eruptions were found). A total of 85 eruptions were large enough to leave evidence behind at both poles. That evidence takes the form of sulfuric acid deposits left behind by the eruptions. It gives researchers clues...

Tiny amounts of salt and dust trapped in the Antarctic ice sheet for the last 740,000 years shed new light on changes to the Earth's climate. The results, published this week in the journal Nature, come from the team who extracted a 3 km long ice core from Dome C, high on East Antarctica's plateau - the oldest continuous climate record obtained from ice cores so far. Since reporting in 2004 that the Earth experienced eight climate cycles (each consisting of an ice age and warm period) the team have been analysing the chemical impurities in the cores to unravel...

The coldest location on the planet has experienced an episode of warm weather this week unlike any ever observed, with temperatures over the eastern Antarctic ice sheet soaring 50 to 90 degrees above normal. The warmth has smashed records and shocked scientists. **SNIP** Parts of eastern Antarctica have seen temperatures hover 70 degrees (40 Celsius) above normal for three days and counting, Wille said. He likened the event to the June heat wave in the Pacific Northwest, which scientists concluded would have been “virtually impossible” without human-caused climate change. What is considered “warm” over the frozen, barren confines of eastern...

Everything I Need to Know About Sarah Palin, I Learned From Sir Ernest Shackleton On July 3rd, 2009, Sarah Palin resigned as Governor of Alaska, and nailed the following sign to her door: “Men Wanted For Hazardous Journey. Small wages. Bitter cold. Long months of complete darkness. Constant danger. Safe return doubtful. Honor and recognition in case of success.” This, the most famous newspaper advertisement ever penned, placed its original author, Sir Ernest Shackleton, in the position of having to select the crew for an Antarctic expedition from among the 5,000 men the ad brought to his office. Comparing Sara...

On July 3rd, 2009, Sarah Palin resigned as Governor of Alaska, and nailed the following sign to her door: “Men Wanted For Hazardous Journey. Small wages. Bitter cold. Long months of complete darkness. Constant danger. Safe return doubtful. Honor and recognition in case of success.” This, the most famous newspaper advertisement ever penned, placed its original author, Sir Ernest Shackleton, in the position of having to select the crew for an Antarctic expedition from among the 5,000 men the ad brought to his office. Comparing Sara Palin to the greatest explorer in history might appear to stretch the limits of...

In ‘Chasing Shackleton’, Tim Jarvis re-enacts a hundred-year-old Antarctic journey using replica gear and clothing. Despite the raging tempests, subzero temperatures, and treacherous crevasse fields, what really tests him are the intrusions of a reality TV crew. This would seem to be a problem unique to modern explorers. But might Shackleton have sympathized? The so-called “heroic age” of polar exploration lasted from the tail end of the Victorian era until the outbreak of World War I. When we consider this period’s doughty adventurers, none speaks more directly to our modern souls than Sir Ernest Shackleton. The exhibitions, movies, books, and...

Ernest Shackleton was the Antarctic’s first motorist, taking a 12/15 Arrol-Johnston on his unsuccessful Nimrod Expedition to the South Pole in 1907. Open-topped, albeit with modifications including non-freeze oil, a silencer designed to act as a footwarmer and skis for the front wheels, the car was more publicity stunt than a practical form of polar transport, writes Jeremy Hart. The Hyundai makeover included fitting giant, heavy-duty, low-pressure tyres to help it traverse the icy, rugged surface – spreading its weight until it could run over someone’s hand without them feeling it. The car’s body had to be raised, with new...

Scientists have found and filmed one of the greatest ever undiscovered shipwrecks 107 years after it sank. The Endurance, the lost vessel of Antarctic explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton, was found at the weekend at the bottom of the Weddell Sea. The ship was crushed by sea-ice and sank in 1915, forcing Shackleton and his men to make an astonishing escape on foot and in small boats. Video of the remains show Endurance to be in remarkable condition. Even though it has been sitting in 3km (10,000ft) of water for over a century, it looks just like it did on the...

A team of adventurers, marine archaeologists and technicians located the wreck at the bottom of the Weddell Sea, east of the Antarctic Peninsula, using undersea drones...Mensun Bound, the expedition's exploration director and a marine archaeologist who has discovered many shipwrecks, said Endurance was the finest he had ever seen. It is upright, clear of the seabed and "in a brilliant state of preservation," he said.

Ernest Shackleton’s lost ice ship, Endurance, has been discovered in the waters of Antarctica’s Weddell Sea. Endurance was crushed and sunk by pack ice in 1915, during Shackleton’s failed attempt to cross the Antarctic continent, and remained lost to the depths for more than a century. Now, the wreck has been found, filmed and surveyed by members of the Endurance22 expedition, which set out in search of the shipwreck in February 2022. After weeks of surveying the seabed, the shipwreck was located in early March 2022, 100 years after Shackleton died in 1922.

It's massive, it's collapsing due to global warming, and when it goes, sea levels are going to rise by a significant amount, perhaps by 10 feet. "All signs point to (the eventuality that) we're not going to keep this glacier from collapsing," said Villanova University Vice President, Chief Research Officer, and Chemistry Professor Amanda Grannas about the glacier that she said is about the size of Florida. "Part of the weights actually extends out over the ocean. So part of the ice is floating on top of the ocean water, and part of it's located over land." Dr. Grannas said...

The seas lapping against America’s coastlines are rising ever faster and will be 10 to 12 inches higher by the year 2050, with major Eastern cities hit regularly with costly floods even on sunny days, a government report says. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and six other federal agencies issued a 111-page report Tuesday that warns of “significant consequences” from rising seas in the next few decades, with parts of Louisiana and Texas projected to see waters a foot and a half (0.45 meters) higher. However, the worst of the long-term sea level rise from the melting of ice...

Someone made a comment about Antarctic islands being named after Covid variants a ways back, but while I was poking around on Google Earth the other day I noticed a pattern on the ocean floor by a certain family name near Alexander Island. Take a look and let me know what you think these divots/hills might be. Appears to be a 14 x 14 grid on the ocean floor, every 6 miles(??).

Image credit: Science Photo Library / Alamy Stock Photo Look at this lanky orange hellspawn. I’m going to go ahead and say that we are not buying whatever it’s selling. We’ve got enough problems without having to contemplate the motivations of this faceless alien baby. Meet the giant Antarctic sea spider (Decolopoda australis), seen here absolutely dwarfing a European sea spider. An example of gigantism, wherein an animal grows unusually large due to a lack of predators and other factors that would limit their size, the Antarctic sea spider can grow to more than 30cm in diameter (about the length...

Antarctica’s so-called Doomsday Glacier, nicknamed because it is huge and coming apart, is mostly thwarting an international effort to figure out how dangerously vulnerable it is. A large iceberg broke off the deteriorating Thwaites glacier and, along with sea ice, it is blocking two research ships with dozens of scientists from examining how fast its crucial ice shelf is falling apart. Scientists from around the world are part of a multi-year $50 million international effort to study the Florida-sized glacier by land, sea and below for the brief time the remote ice is reachable during the Antarctic summer..... What worries...

In July 2017, a giant iceberg, named A-68, snapped off Antarctica’s Larsen-C ice shelf and began an epic journey across the Southern Ocean. Three and a half years later, the main part of iceberg, A-68A, drifted worryingly close to South Georgia. Concerns were that the berg would run aground in the shallow waters offshore. This would not only cause damage to the seafloor ecosystem but also make it difficult for island wildlife, such as penguins, to make their way to the sea to feed. Using measurements from satellites, scientists have charted how A-68A shrunk towards the end of its voyage,...

Nests of icefish. Credit: AWI OFOBS Team Researchers detect around 60 million nests of Antarctic icefish over a 240 square kilometers area in the Weddell Sea. Near the Filchner Ice Shelf in the south of the Antarctic Weddell Sea, a research team has found the world’s largest fish breeding area known to date. A towed camera system photographed and filmed thousands of nests of icefish of the species Neopagetopsis ionah on the seabed. The density of the nests and the size of the entire breeding area suggest a total number of about 60 million icefish breeding at the time of...