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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 Federal Government will seek the full costs incurred during the recovery effort to save the MV Akademik Shokalskiy. Federal Environment Minister Greg Hunt yesterday said costs, estimated at about $2.4 million, would be sought from the insurer of the operators of the vessel.

Antarctica is melting, adding to the inexorable rise in global sea levels, endangering millions of lives and whole economies, leading scientists said on Monday. But while the effect is well known after years of monitoring from land and space, the reasons for the sea warming are not. "We know sea levels will rise. We need to know by how much and why," Anthony Payne of the University of Bristol and one of the organizers of a major scientific conference in London, told Reuters on the sidelines of the meeting at the Royal Society, Britain's national academy of science. "This has...