The water under a vulnerable Antarctic glacier is warming. Its catastrophic collapse could trigger a dramatic increase in global sea level.
Antarctica
Posted inNews
Controlled Explosions Pave the Way for Thwaites Glacier Research
Scientists detonate explosives in West Texas to prepare for fieldwork in West Antarctica.
Posted inNews
What Lies Beneath Is Important for Ice Sheets
New research reconstructing the topography of Antarctica shows that the continent has 25% less land above sea level than when ice first started to accumulate 34 million years ago.
Posted inNews
Antarctic Ice Cores Offer a Whiff of Earth’s Ancient Atmosphere
Bubbles of greenhouse gases trapped in ice shed new light on an important climate transition that occurred about a million years ago.
Posted inNews
Freshwater Pools Show Antarctica Is More Vulnerable Than We Thought
East Antarctica’s lakes cluster in patterns similar to those on Greenland’s ice sheet, which is melting rapidly.
Posted inNews
Drilling into the Past to Predict the Future
Climate change is at the center of a remarkable international drilling operation into Antarctica’s Ross Ice Shelf.
Posted inNews
Vintage Radar Film Tracks What’s Beneath Antarctic Ice
The newly digitized data double the timescale of ice-penetrating radar monitoring in some of the fastest changing areas of Antarctica.
Posted inEditors' Vox
Antarctic Seasonal Sea Ice Melts Faster Than It Grows
Winds are thought to play a significant role in driving the asymmetric seasonal cycle of Antarctic sea ice growth and melt.
Posted inOpinions
Overcoming Ice and Stereotypes at the Bottom of the World
The Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center celebrates the 50th anniversary of the first all-women research team in Antarctica.
Posted inEditors' Vox
Science in a Frozen Ocean
It’s notoriously difficult to access, but new technologies, international collaboration, regional models, and interdisciplinary approaches are improving understanding of the Weddell Gyre.