Free Republic

When do ice ages begin? In June, of course. Analysis of Antarctic ice cores led by Kenji Kawamura, a visiting scientist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego, shows that the last four great ice age cycles began when Earth’s distance from the sun during its annual orbit became great enough to prevent summertime melts of glacial ice. The absence of those melts allowed buildups of the ice over periods of time that would become characterized as glacial periods. Results of the study appear in the Aug. 23 edition of the journal Nature. Jeff Severinghaus, a Scripps geoscientist and...

n part one of 'South Pole Ponies - The Forgotten Story of Antarctica’s Meat-Eating Horses' posted yesterday we met Frederick George Jackson's favorite mare, Brownie, who ate polar bear meat and Socks who en route to the South Pole became the first known horse to consume meat together with a human, Shackleton, demonstrating that both species are omnivores. In this final part CuChullaine O'Reilly shares another piece of little known polar history. "In stark contrast to modern dogma," O'Reilly writes, "which insists that it was a race to the Pole that pitted British man-haulers against more competent Norwegian dog-sledders, there...

The collapse of the Wilkins Ice Shelf in Antarctica has been big news this Spring. It was big news last Spring too. In fact the headlines were almost exactly the same, and the photos have been recycled from last year. The linked story from Watts Up With That is worth reading because it clearly reveals the amount of deception that went into this much hyped story. The same scientest from the National Snow & Ice Data Center is quoted in 2009, 2008 and as far back as 1999 talking about how the Wilkins Ice Shelf is due to disappear. The...

Antarctica 'melting for 10,000 years' There is new evidence parts of the Antarctic ice sheet have been naturally melting for thousands of years. The research suggests the West Antarctic Ice Sheet has been contributing water to the ocean for the last 10,000 years. Scientists analysed loose rocks to find out when they were dropped by the melting glaciers. And if melting carries on at the same pace, within another 7,000 years an area of around 360,000 square miles will have disappeared. The research was led by John Stone, associate professor of Earth and space sciences at the University of Washington....