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Russian scientists are set to pierce through Antarctica’s frozen surface to reveal the secrets of an icebound lake that has been sealed deep there for the past 15 million years. Alexei Turkeyev, head of the Russian polar Vostok Station, told Reuters by satellite phone that scientists have “only a bit left to go.” His team has been drilling for weeks in a race to reach the lake -- buried 12,000 feet beneath the polar ice cap -- before the end of the brief Antarctic summer. With the quickly returning onset of winter, scientists will be forced to leave on the...

Lake Vostok, which has been sealed off from the world for 14 million years, is about to be penetrated by a Russian drill bit. The lake, which lies four kilometres below the icy surface of Antarctica, is unique in that it's been completely isolated from the other 150 subglacial lakes on the continent for such a long time. It's also oligotropic, meaning that it's supersaturated with oxygen -- levels of the element are 50 times higher than those found in most typical freshwater lakes. Since 1990, the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute in St Petersberg in Russia has been drilling...

As my colleague David M. Herszenhorn reports, scientists are poised to take some highly anticipated samples from a deep subglacial lake in Antarctica, saying on Wednesday that they had succeeded in boring through more than two miles of ice. The state-financed broadcaster Russia Today posted video of the researchers at the frigid Antarctic outpost, including clips of them snowmobiling around the endless expanse of ice and snow and watching supply planes land. What evolutionary secrets Lake Vostok — named after the Russian research station above it — may hold after being sealed under ice for millions of years has tantalized...

Oldest ever ice core promises climate revelations An ice core recently shipped from Antarctica has yielded its first, eagerly awaited results. The tests confirm that the 3200-metre core dates back at least 750,000 years, making the ice the oldest continuous core ever retrieved.Gases and particles trapped in the layers of an ice core provide information about the Earth's climate and atmosphere. Oxygen and hydrogen isotopes reveal the temperature when the ice formed, for example, while high carbon dioxide and methane levels indicate periods of global warming.A group of research teams called the European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica (EPICA)...

Antarctic Ice Core over 500,000 Years Old Extracted CAMBRIDGE, UK, March 14, 2002 (ENS) - Ice more than half a million years old has been taken from deep below the East Antarctic ice sheet, setting what is believed to be a new record. The multi-nation European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica (EPICA) drilling at Dome Concordia has recovered ice believed to be around 530,000 years old, according to the British Antarctic Survey. Previously the Russian Vostok ice core, dating back 420,000 years, was regarded as the oldest ice to be drilled from Antarctica. The EPICA team, from 10...

Pine Island Glacier in Antarctica, seen from NASA's Terra satellite. NASA/GSFC/METI/ERSDAC/JAROS; U.S./Japan ASTER Science Team. Antarctica is so vast that the pictures give you no sense of scale. The pencil-thin line across the satellite image of Pine Island Glacier (above) is actually more than 18 miles long, 800 feet across in places, and 180 feet deep.

Researchers recently uncovered a startling phenomenon — a set of teardrop-shaped lakes in Antarctica that mysteriously move, jogging along at a pace as fast as 5 feet (1.5 meters) per day. The lakes sit atop the George VI ice shelf — a massive floating plain of ice larger than Vermont, composed of the mingled fronts of glaciers that flow off the edge of the continent and rest on the ocean. Glaciologist Doug MacAyeal at the University of Chicago, and student researcher C.H. LaBarbera, noticed the traveling bodies of water while studying satellite images of 11 ice shelf lakes captured between...

The penetration to relict water of subglacial Lake Vostok happened at last on 5 February at 20.25 Moscow time. On 4 February there was a contact of the drill with the water lens at the borehole depth of 3766 m. The ice core bottom segment extracted from this depth served as evidence – the surface of the lower 70 cm of the ice core was glazed, as if it were submerged to water just before recovery. No ducts or capillaries in the ice core body were visually observed at this. Exactly this contact with the water lens in the borehole...

A group of Russian scientists in Antarctica has succeeded in drilling to a lake buried two miles beneath the icy landmass, the state-run Russian news service Ria Novosti reported -- following a week of radio silence from the team that had some scratching their heads. “Yesterday, our scientists stopped drilling at the depth of 3,768 meters and reached the surface of the sub-glacial lake,” the source reportedly said in a story posted Monday, Feb. 6. An unnamed source with Russia's Federal Service for Hydrometeorology confirmed the news as well, Russian business newspaper The View reported. John Priscu, a microbiologist with...

An American professor and expert of the Antarctic said he believes contact with a team of Russian scientists that has not made contact with colleagues in the U.S for seven days has merely been busy as they drill into a lake buried beneath the Antarctic ice for 20 million years. Professor John Priscu told usnews.com in an email that the crews have been working ‘round the clock’ to beat the end of Antarctic summer, which ends Tuesday. Afterwards, temperatures will fall to deadly levels.

A TEAM of Russian scientists has gone quiet as they race against winter to uncover an ancient Antarctic lake. The group from Russia's Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute (AARI) have been drilling for weeks in an effort to reach isolated Lake Vostok, a vast, dark body of water hidden 4000m below the surface of the continent. Lake Vostok has not been exposed to air in more than 20 million years. The team's last contact with colleagues in the outside world was six days ago, and scientists from around the globe are unsure of the fate of the mission - and...

The scientific community is holding its breath for a team of Russian scientists that has been out of contact with colleagues in the U.S for six days, as they drill into a lake buried beneath the Antarctic ice for 20 million years. They have to evacuate their station by Tuesday - when winter proper kicks in and temperatures start to drop to an inhospitable minus 90C. The scientists are currently battling conditions of up to minus 66C at Lake Vostok as they raced to drill into a lake buried two miles beneath the ice before the weather closed in. They...

A group of Russian scientists plumbing the frozen Antarctic in search of a lake buried in ice for tens of millions of years have failed to respond to increasingly anxious U.S. colleagues -- and as the days creep by, the fate of the team remains unknown."No word from the ice for 5 days," Dr. John Priscu professor of Ecology at Montana State University, told FoxNews.com via email.

Rescue ships are racing to save a Russian crew who have taken to lifeboats after their fishing ship hit an iceberg taking on water. The crew of the stricken Sparta, which is listing at 13 degrees, are trying to empty water from the ship as it slowly sinks in the Ross Sea near Antarctica with a 5ft hole in the hull below the water line. But vessels speeding towards it are being hampered by heavy sea ice and are unlikely to reach the the area - about 2,000 nautical miles south east of New Zealand - for four to five...

Explanation: Where is the best place on Earth to find meteorites? Although meteors fall all over the world, they usually just sink to the bottom of an ocean, are buried by shifting terrain, or are easily confused with terrestrial rocks. At the bottom of the Earth, however, in East Antarctica, huge sheets of blue ice remain pure and barren. When traversing such a sheet, a dark rock will stick out. These rocks have a high probability of being true meteorites -- likely pieces of another world. An explosion or impact might have catapulted these meteorites from the Moon, Mars, or...

Explanation: Last Friday, the fourth and final partial solar eclipse of 2011 was only visible from high latitudes in the southern hemisphere. If you missed it, check out this dramatic picture of the geocentric celestial event from a very high southern latitude on the continent of Antarctica. From a camera positioned at San Martín Station (Argentina) near the antarctic peninsula mountain range, the picture looks toward the south and east. The Sun and silhouetted lunar disk are seen through thin, low clouds. Perhaps fittingly, the mountainous slope in the foreground is part of the larger Roman Four Promontory, named for...

Scientists say they can now explain the existence of what are perhaps Earth's most extraordinary mountains. The Gamburtsevs are the size of the European Alps and yet they are totally buried beneath the Antarctic ice. Their discovery in the 1950s was a major surprise. Most people had assumed the rock bed deep within the continent would be flat and featureless. Survey data now suggests the range first formed over a billion years ago, researchers tell the journal Nature. The Gamburtsevs are important because they are thought to be the location where the ice sheet we know today initiated its march...

It's official, long-necked sauropod dinosaurs once roamed every continent on Earth — including now-frigid Antarctica. The discovery of a single sauropod vertebra on James Ross Island in Antarctica reveals that these behemoths, which included Diplodocus, Brachiosaurus and Apatosaurus, lived on the continent in the upper Cretaceous Period about 100 million years ago.

A huge, emerging crack has been discovered in one of Antarctica's glaciers, with a NASA plane mission providing the first-ever detailed airborne measurements of a major iceberg breakup in progress. NASA's Operation Ice Bridge, the largest airborne survey of Earth's polar ice ever flown, is in the midst of its third field campaign from Punta Arenas, Chile. .. The glaciers of the Antarctic, and Greenland, Ice Sheets, commonly birth icebergs that break off from the main ice streams where they flow in to the sea, a process called calving. The crack was found in c, which last calved a significant...

Cosmic Impact Site That Created Earth’s Axial Tilt and Fault Lines © Mihai Radu Draghici Abstract: Using Google Earth and browsing the geographic appearance of the Earth’s crust starting from the South Pacific Ocean right above Antarctica and traveling over to Drake’s Passage and into the South Atlantic Ocean there seems to be a visual trace that some sort of cosmic collision occurred in that area. (See Figure 1) The impact of the object surfed across the ocean and collided with the bottom of South America where it once connected to Antarctica creating Drake’s Passage opening. This impact also may...

Ancient mega-catastrophe paved way for the dinosaurs, spawned Australian continent. Planetary scientists have found evidence of a meteor impact much larger and earlier than the one that killed the dinosaurs -- an impact that they believe caused the biggest mass extinction in Earth's history.The 300-mile-wide crater lies hidden more than a mile beneath the East Antarctic Ice Sheet. And the 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.Its size and location -- in the Wilkes Land...

The collision happened around 870 000 years ago, a time when Homo erectus, man’s early ancestor, was still roaming the planet. Molten asteroid slabs melted through more than 1.5 kilometres of ice and snow to reach the underlying bedrock... Billions of tons of ice, snow and rock would have been vaporised and thrown into the atmosphere. Rock particles that fell to the ground have been located more that 5 000 kilometres away in Australia. The impact was so immense that it is being considered as the cause of a reversal of the Earth’s magnetic polarity around this time. One...

A snapshot of New Zealand's climate 40 million years ago reveals a greenhouse Earth, with warmer seas and little or no ice in Antarctica, according to research recently published in the journal Geology. The study suggests that Antarctica at that time was yet to develop extensive ice sheets. Back then, New Zealand was about 1100 km further south, at the same latitude as the southern tip of South America -- so was closer to Antarctica -- but the researchers found that the water temperature was 23-25°C at the sea surface and 11-13°C at the bottom. "This is too warm to...

Deadliest Catch was nominated this season for four Emmy's. "Deadliest Catch" went up against "Myth Busters" for Outstanding Reality Program and won. "Deadliest Catch" also captured the Emmy for Outstanding Cinematography, Outstanding Picture Editing and Outstanding sound mixing. This is great news for fans (and cast members and producers and editors and cameramen) who've been watching the show for a long time. The creative arts industry has affirmed and acknowledged the intelligent and inspiring television that most of its viewers have seen as the show developed into a more intense interpersonal drama from a random story of water cowboys searching...

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...

Longtime readers of WUWT may remember this story from 2008:Nutty Story of the Day: “Global Warming” is Killing the Penguins in AntarcticaThe root of this goes back as far as 2006, such as this MSNBC story:click image for the story at MSNBC.com Now it appears that assertion of a link between global warming and penguin deaths is dying  faster than the penguins themselves. In what appears to be a manifestation of the observer effect problem in science (the act of observing changes the outcome) we have this article from the science journal Nature that says the act of tagging penguins so...

Dog-sized dinosaurs that lived near the South Pole, sometimes in the dark for months at a time, had bone tissue very similar to dinosaurs that lived everywhere on the planet, according to a doctoral candidate at Montana State University. That surprising fact falsifies a 13-year-old study and may help explain why dinosaurs were able to dominate the planet for 160 million years, said Holly Woodward, MSU graduate student in the Department of Earth Sciences and co-author of a paper published Aug. 3 in the journal PLoS ONE. "If we were trying to find evidence of dinosaurs doing something much different...

Boulder, CO, USA - An international team of researchers has found the strongest evidence yet that parts of North America and Antarctica were connected 1.1 billion years ago, long before the supercontinent Pangaea formed. "I can go to the Franklin Mountains in West Texas and stand next to what was once part of Coats Land in Antarctica," said Staci Loewy, a geochemist at California State University, Bakersfield, who led the study. "That's so amazing." Loewy and her colleagues discovered that rocks collected from both locations have the exact same composition of lead isotopes. Earlier analyses showed the rocks to be...

A string of a dozen volcanoes, at least several of them active, has been found beneath the frigid seas near Antarctica, the first such discovery in that region. Some of the peaks tower nearly 10,000 feet (3,000 meters) above the ocean floor — nearly tall enough to break the water's surface. "That's a big volcano. That's a very big volcano. If that was on land it would be quite remarkable," said Philip Leat, a vulcanologist with the British Antarctic Survey who led a seafloor mapping expedition to the region in 2007 and 2010. The group of 12 underwater mountains lies...

Scientists from British Antarctic Survey (BAS) have discovered previously unknown volcanoes in the ocean waters around the remote South Sandwich Islands. Using ship-borne sea-floor mapping technology during research cruises onboard the RRS James Clark Ross, the scientists found 12 volcanoes beneath the sea surface – some up to 3km high. They found 5km diameter craters left by collapsing volcanoes and 7 active volcanoes visible above the sea as a chain of islands. The research is important also for understanding what happens when volcanoes erupt or collapse underwater and their potential for creating serious hazards such as tsunamis. Also this sub-sea...

A painstaking examination of the first direct and detailed climate record from the continental shelves surrounding Antarctica reveals that the last remnant of Antarctic vegetation existed in a tundra landscape on the continent's northern peninsula about 12 million years ago. The research, which was led by researchers at Rice University and Louisiana State University, appears online this week and will be featured on the cover of the July 12 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences... In the warmest period in Earth's past 55 million years, Antarctica was ice-free and forested. The continent's vast ice sheets, which...

Carbon dioxide certainly warms our planet, but it might not turn on the heat, reveals a new analysis of ancient Antarctic ice.

Thirty-eight million years ago, tropical jungles thrived in what are now the cornfields of the American Midwest and furry marsupials wandered temperate forests in what is now the frozen Antarctic. The temperature differences of that era, known as the late Eocene, between the equator and Antarctica were half what they are today. A debate has been ongoing in the scientific community about what changes in our global climate system led to such a major shift from the more tropical, greenhouse climate of the Eocene to modern and much cooler climates. New research results published in this week's issue of the...

...Antarctic clams, snails and brittle stars, because of adaptation to their environment, have soft shells and have never had to fight shell-crushing predators. “You can take an Antarctic clam and crush it with your hands,” McClintock said. They could be the main prey for these crabs, he said. Loss of unique mollusks could jeopardize organisms with disease-fighting compounds, McClintock said. Sea squirts, for example, produce an agent that fights skin cancer. If the crabs eat them, it could bring McClintock’s research with that organism to a halt...

First of the parasitic parasites to be discovered in a natural environment points to hidden diversity. A genomic survey of the microbial life in an Antarctic lake has revealed a new virophage — a virus that attacks viruses. The discovery suggests that these life forms are more common, and have a larger role in the environment, than was once thought. An Australian research team found the virophage while surveying the extremely salty Organic Lake in eastern Antarctica. While sequencing the collective genome of microbes living in the surface waters, they discovered the virus, which they dubbed the Organic Lake Virophage...

There’s some surprising reaction to the press release we covered on WUWT recently. Here’s some excerpts: Knowing how the massive ice sheets atop  Antarctica and Greenland work is key to predicting how global warming could raise sea  levels and flood coastal cities. But a new study  upends what scientists thought they knew. It  turns out it’s not just ancient snow that makes  up the ice sheets, but water deep under the  sheets also thaws and refreezes over time. To put it in non-scientific terms, lead scientist  Robin Bell told msnbc.com, the study redefines “how squishy” the base of ice sheets...

The Earth's polar regions long have been considered canaries in the coal mine on climate change - the first places to look, many scientists said, to learn whether the planet's temperature is, in fact, rising. Indeed, climate models generally predict that the heating of the atmosphere - precipitated by global warming - will cause the vast layer of ice that covers Antarctica to melt, raising sea levels and changing regional climate patterns by altering ocean currents. This week, that widely held presumption is being challenged. Two studies of temperatures and ice-cap movements in Antarctica suggest that the Southern Hemisphere's ...

Climate: New study slashes estimate of icecap loss PARIS (AFP) - – Estimates of the rate of ice loss from Greenland and West Antarctica, one of the most worrying questions in the global warming debate, should be halved, according to Dutch and US scientists.In the last two years, several teams have estimated Greenland is shedding roughly 230 gigatonnes of ice, or 230 billion tonnes, per year and West Antarctica around 132 gigatonnes annually.Together, that would account for more than half of the annual three-millimetre (0.2 inch) yearly rise in sea levels, a pace that compares dramatically with 1.8mm (0.07 inches)...

PARIS (AFP) – Global warming may wipe out three-quarters of Europe's alpine glaciers by 2100 and hike sea levels by four metres (13 feet) by the year 3000 through melting the West Antarctic icesheet, two studies published on Sunday said. The research places the spotlight on two of the least understood aspects of climate change: how, when and where warming will affect glaciers on which many millions depend for their water, and the problems faced by generations in the far distant future. The glacier study predicts that mountain glaciers and icecaps will shrink by 15-27 percent in volume terms on...

Like exploding stars, black holes, dark matter? How about cosmic intrigue, deep space astronomy , or origins of the universe? Then you’re gonna love this. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin are putting the finishing touches on a giant underground telescope buried beneath the South Pole to help understand said phenomenon.

A "telescope" buried deep under Antarctic ice has detected the first signals that scientists hope will allow them to identify the source of mysterious particles that bombard Earth from outer space. For the past ten years scientists have been planning and building an ambitious experiment to explain the mystery of what produces the cosmic rays and elusive particles known as neutrinos, which constantly pepper our planet. more at Telegraph.co.UK

Newswise — Researchers at Northeastern University and the University of California, Irvine say that scientists might soon have evidence for extra dimensions and other exotic predictions of string theory. Early results from a neutrino detector at the South Pole, called AMANDA, show that ghostlike particles from space could serve as probes to a world beyond our familiar three dimensions, the research team says. No more than a dozen high-energy neutrinos have been detected so far. However, the current detection rate and energy range indicate that AMANDA's larger successor, called IceCube, now under construction, could provide the first evidence for string...

Antarctic telescope delivers first neutrino sky map UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON NEWS RELEASE Posted: July 30, 2003 A novel telescope that uses the Antarctic ice sheet as its window to the cosmos has produced the first map of the high-energy neutrino sky. The map, unveiled for astronomers at a meeting of the International Astronomical Union, provides astronomers with their first tantalizing glimpse of very high-energy neutrinos, ghostly particles that are believed to emanate from some of the most violent events in the universe -- crashing black holes, gamma ray bursts, and the violent cores of distant galaxies. The first map of...

Four fishermen were dead and 18 missing after a South Korean deep-sea trawler with 42 crew onboard sank off Antarctica, Maritime New Zealand said. "The vessel is believed to have gone down at 6:30am (local time) about 1,000 nautical miles north of McMurdo (Antarctic base)," Maritime NZ spokesman Ross Henderson said. "We have 20 alive, four deceased and 18 missing."

Athens, Ga. – In so many ways, Don Juan Pond in the Dry Valleys of Antarctica is one of the most unearthly places on the planet. An ankle-deep mirror between mountain peaks and rubbled moraine, the pond is an astonishing 18 times saltier than the Earth's oceans and virtually never freezes, even in temperatures of more than 40 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. Now, a research team led by biogeochemists from the University of Georgia has discovered at the site a previously unreported chemical mechanism for the production of nitrous oxide, an important greenhouse gas. Possibly even more important, the discovery...

Famed global warming activist James Schneider and a journalist friend were both found frozen to death on Saturday, about 90 miles from South Pole Station, by the pilot of a ski plane practicing emergency evacuation procedures.
 
"I couldn't believe what I was seeing", recounted the pilot, Jimmy Dolittle. "There were two snowmobiles with cargo sleds, a tent, and a bright orange rope that had been laid out on the ice, forming the words, 'HELP-COLD'."
 
One friend of Prof. Schneider told ecoEnquirer that he had been planning a trip to an ice sheet to film the devastation brought on by global warming. His...

Humans may have spent thousands of years trying to master the art of the perfect sculpture, but these incredible photographs of icebergs show they are no match for nature's grand design. Pictured off the Western Antarctic Peninsula, these colossal ice carvings have been whittled away by biting polar winds, freezing water and sub-zero temperatures to form incredible mega structures that take the breath away.

One three-inch shrimp—happily swimming under 600 feet of ice, 12.5 miles from open water—has shattered all scientists' theories on life-harboring environments. An impossible discovery that opens the possibility of complex extraterrestrial life in our Solar System: "We were operating on the presumption that nothing's there. It was a shrimp you'd enjoy having on your plate. We were just gaga over it." Those are the words of NASA's Robert Bindschadler. Until now, scientists thought that only microbial life could live under these conditions. Stacy Kim—one of the biologists in NASA's ice science team—says that they don't really have a clue about...

SNIP "Some climate scientists have distanced themselves from the IPCC Working Group II’s (WGII’s) Fourth Assessment Report (AR4), Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability, prefering instead the stronger hard science in the Working Group I (WGI) Report—The Physical Science Basis. Some folks have even gone as far as saying that no errors have been found in the WGI Report and the process in creating it was exemplary. Such folks are in denial. SNIP SNIP.. "This inconsistency was brought to the IPCC Chapter 4 authors’ attention by several IPCC commenters. Commentor John Church wrote “I do not understand why this trend is insignificant...

Thanks Stephen Messenger, TreeHugger, Of Yahoo GREEN.