It is cold down in Antarctica. And to drill into the ice one needs lot of heat. In December 2012 a team of British scientists, engineers and support staff, led by Professor Martin Siegert of the University of Bristol, planned to drill through 3km of solid ice into subglacial Lake Ellsworth in Antarctica. Their mission is to search for life forms in the water and clues to past climate in (more…)

International talks to protect large areas of the Southern Ocean surrounding Antarctica collapsed last week after several nations, including China, blocked the proposal over concerns about fishing access, according to reports.

Representatives from 25 member states — including (more…)

Scientists say a hole in the Arctic’s protective ozone layer last winter was the largest ever recorded, reaching an extent typically observed above Antarctica.

While so-called ozone “holes” have occurred each summer since the mid-1980s over Antarctica — (more…)

According to a new NASA-funded study, Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are losing mass at a much faster rate than previous model forecasts have predicted. The study, the longest of its kind—almost 20 years—used satellites to measure changes in polar ice sheet mass. Results suggest that the ice sheets, found only in Antarctica and Greenland, are melting (more…)

There are many earth cycles. One is a cycling between warmer and colder periods which are commonly called ice ages. The causes of these cycles are complex and are related to how much sun radiation we get as well as some slight variation in the sun itself. Scientists have recently found a possible source of a huge carbon dioxide burp that happened some 18,000 years ago and which helped to end the last ice age. (more…)