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The stunning sight of emerald green-colored icebergs in Antarctica has been documented for more than a century — in literature and beyond. For decades, scientists have argued about the cause behind the bizarre phenomenon and debated why the green-hued ice chunks aren't the typical blue or white color. But a recent discovery from a 2016 research trip to East Antarctica’s Amery Ice Shelf may provide the final clue they've been waiting for. In a new study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans, researchers found marine ice varies in color due to the "abundance of foreign constituents in the...

A Dubai-based engineering firm wants to tow icebergs from Antarctica to Dubai in order to provide the city with a reserve of fresh drinking water. The firm will use satellite imagery to select candidate icebergs. It's eyeing icebergs that are between 2,000 and 7,000 feet long, and weigh around 100 million tons. But the plan is short on details: the firm doesn't know exactly how it will get the icebergs to Dubai, or how the icebergs will be stored. What do you do if you're a fast-growing city in the desert with lots of thirsty people and little freshwater reserves?...

Huge icebergs could be towed from Antarctica to Cape Town in a bid to solve South Africa's worst drought in a century. Marine salvage experts are floating the plan to tug the icebergs to the region after its seen the worst water shortage in decades. Salvage master Nick Sloane told Reuters news agency he was looking for government and private investors for a scheme to guide huge chunks of ice across the ocean, chop them into a slurry and melt them down into millions of litres of drinking water. "We want to show that if there is no other source...

BOSTON (CBS) – The historic winter of 2015 has left giant chunks of ice on the Cape Cod National Seashore. Cape Cod photographer Dapixara captured images of a person standing next to the massive pieces of ice that washed ashore in Wellfleet over the past few days. WBZ-TV Chief Meteorologist Eric Fisher says this could be a “once-in-a-generation” event due to the extraordinary amount of ice on the Massachusetts Bay. Fisher says the ice won’t be around for long. There have been several remarkable images left from the record-setting winter, including the nearly frozen waves captured off the coast of...

Listening to icebergs could help to assess the extent of glacier melt, scientists report. Researchers in Poland, the UK and US have found different types of icebergs have their own acoustic signature as they calve away from the ice. Monitoring this could help to determine how much ice is being lost and the effect this could have on global sea level rise. The findings are reported in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. Oskar Glowacki, from the Institute of Geophysics at the Polish Academy of Sciences, said: "Using acoustics, we can get very accurate data and we can collect this data...

Despite dire predictions that the North Pole would be ice-free in the near future, Arctic Sea ice levels have been more stable than scientists predicted.  So far this winter, Arctic Sea ice levels are above where they were at the same time last winter and are well within the the standard deviation of the 1981 to 2010 variation, according to daily sea ice data.Europe’s CryoSat-2 satellite found that sea-ice volumes for the fall of 2014 were above the average extent for the last five years. Sea-ice levels were up sharply from 2011 and 2012, according to the satellite– only slightly...

"It turns out that all the Titanic needed was a drone. A Montreal-based shipping company has become the first in the world to use drones to scout out ice hazards as its freighters navigate through the waters of the Arctic. The company, Fednav, has found the drones, or unmanned aerial vehicles, are able to transmit crucial information back to the wheelhouse, allowing ship captains to thread their way through frozen waters and dodge icebergs, like the one that sank the iconic ship more than a century ago."

Efforts to remove climate-warming carbon dioxide from Earth’s atmosphere appear to be getting a helping hand from a surprising source: the iron in meltwater from Antarctic icebergs. Icebergs calving off of Antarctica are shedding substantial iron — the equivalent of a growth-boosting vitamin — into waters starved of the mineral, a new set of studies demonstrates. This iron is fertilizing the growth of microscopic plants and algae, transforming the waters adjacent to ice floes into teeming communities of everything from tiny shrimplike krill to fish, birds and sometimes mammals.

SYDNEY – A massive iceberg struck Antarctica, dislodging another giant block of ice from a glacier, Australian and French scientists said Friday. The two icebergs are drifting together about 62 to 93 miles (100 to 150 kilometers) off eastern Antarctica following the collision on Feb. 12 or 13, said Australian Antarctic Division glaciologist Neal Young. "It gave it a pretty big nudge," Young said of the 60-mile (97-kilometer) -long iceberg, about the size of Luxembourg, that collided with the giant floating Mertz Glacier and shaved off a new iceberg. "They are now floating right next to each other." The new...

Climate Change: We can't stop terrorists from boarding planes with explosive undies, but the CIA has assets sufficient to monitor Arctic ice and look for signs of global warming? Is al-Qaida recruiting polar bears? One wouldn't think that the increasing polar bear population and the increasing rate of recidivism of former Guantanamo detainees released into the wild were related, but they are. At the urging of Al Gore, the administration is signing on to a plan to task vital intelligence assets to protect not the people of the United States, but the environment. The program, shot down by President Bush,...

SYDNEY (AFP) – More than 100, and possibly hundreds, of Antarctic icebergs are floating towards New Zealand in a rare event which has prompted a shipping warning, officials said on Monday. An Australian Antarctic Division glaciologist said the ice chunks, spotted by satellite photography, had passed the Auckland Islands and were heading towards the main South Island, about 450 kilometres (280 miles) northeast. Scientist Neal Young said more than 100 icebergs -- some measuring more than 200 metres (650 feet) across -- were seen in just one cluster, indicating there could be hundreds more. He said they were the remains...

Climate Change: As a Colorado Rockies playoff game is snowed out, scientists report that Arctic sea ice is thickening and Antarctic snow melt is the lowest in three decades. Whatever happened to global warming? Al Gore wasn't there to throw out the first snowball, er, baseball, so he might not have noticed that Saturday's playoff game between the Colorado Rockies and the Philadelphia Phillies was snowed out - in early October. The field should have been snow-free just as the North Pole was to be ice-free this year. It seems that ice at both poles hasn't been paying attention to...

Climate Change: As a Colorado Rockies playoff game is snowed out, scientists report that Arctic sea ice is thickening and Antarctic snow melt is the lowest in three decades. Whatever happened to global warming? Al Gore wasn't there to throw out the first snowball, er, baseball, so he might not have noticed that Saturday's playoff game between the Colorado Rockies and the Philadelphia Phillies was snowed out — in early October. The field should have been snow-free just as the North Pole was to be ice-free this year. It seems that ice at both poles hasn't been paying attention to...

Seabed scratches show icebergs reached the tropics 09 June 2008 NewScientist.com news service ICEBERGS often etch out messages on the shallow ocean floor. Now a newly discovered set of scratches suggests bergs from the icy north drifted further south than we thought after the last ice age. The meltdown of North American ice sheets about 15,000 years ago released a flotilla of icebergs into the Atlantic. Gouges left by bergs on the ocean bed have previously been found off New Jersey, close to the southernmost edge of the ice sheet, but it had been thought that looping currents would have...

Rainbow iceberg in the Antarctic By Laura Clout Last Updated: 2:39AM GMT 19/03/2008Resembling a strange creature from the deep, this rare marbled iceberg was spotted in the waters of the Antarctic by a Norwegian sailor. Rainbow iceberg in the AntarcticOyvind Tangen, 62, was on board the research ship G O Sars when he photographed the unusual ice formation, floating a few miles off the coast of the frozen continent. While most icebergs are white due to tiny bubbles trapped inside, which scatter the light in every direction, some pick up a multitude of colours due to various natural phenomena. Green...

NEW YORK — The tragic sinking of the Titanic nearly a century ago can be blamed on low grade rivets that the ship's builders used on some parts of the ill-fated liner, two experts on metals conclude in a new book. The company, Harland and Wolff of Belfast, Northern Ireland, needed to build the ship quickly and at reasonable cost, which may have compromised quality, said co-author Timothy Foecke. That the shipyard was building two other vessels at the same time added to the difficulty of getting the millions of rivets needed, he added. "Under the pressure to get these...

Titanic, left, and Olympic sat next to one another in a double gantry in the last photo of the two together, weeks before Olympic set sail Researchers have discovered that the builder of the Titanic struggled for years to obtain enough good rivets and riveters and ultimately settled on faulty materials that doomed the ship, which sank 96 years ago Tuesday. The builder’s own archives, two scientists say, harbor evidence of a deadly mix of low quality rivets and lofty ambition as the builder labored to construct the three biggest ships in the world at once — the Titanic...

Plowing the Ancient Seas: Iceberg scours found off South Carolina Sid Perkins Recent sonar surveys off the southeastern coast of the United States have detected dozens of broad furrows on the seafloor—trenches that were carved by icebergs during the last ice age, researchers suggest. FLOW REVERSAL. Currents driving the icebergs that scoured channels in the seafloor off South Carolina at the height of the last ice age ran almost exactly opposite to today's prevailing currents. Channel shown in inset is about 100 meters wide. Hill, et al. The channels, roughly parallel to the coast, are between 10 and 100 meters...

As the Democratic presidential race finally gets down to brass tacks, two issues are becoming paramount. But only one of them is clearly on the table. That is the issue of illegal immigration. A very smart Democrat, a veteran of the Clinton administration, told me that he expects it to be a key part of any Republican campaign and that he is worried about his party's ability to respond. I think he has good reason to worry. The failure of the Democratic Congress, like its Republican predecessor, to enact comprehensive immigration reform, including improved border security, has left individual states...

WELLINGTON (AFP) - Two icebergs drifting off the New Zealand coast have attracted massive interest from sightseers as well as sparking fresh warnings to shipping after their 13,500 kilometre journey from Antarctica. The icebergs were about 100 kilometres (60 miles) off the Otago coast in the south-east of the country Wednesday, the closest sighting off New Zealand for 75 years, The National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) said. Helicopters have been taking scientists and sightseers out to view the massive slabs of ice. One is about 500 metres (1,600 feet) long, 50 metres wide and 60 metres high,...