Moss from additional sites on the Antarctic Peninsula has allowed scientists to get a clear picture of the ecological changes the region underwent over the past 50 years. A new study builds on previous research from 2013, where scientists studied mosses and microbes growing at the southern end of the Antarctic Peninsula. In the recent […]
Tag: antarctic
How gentoo penguins faced extinction three times—and survived
Over the past 7000 years, gentoo penguins on the Antarctic Peninsula have been wiped out to near extinction by a volcanic eruption—not once, but three times, according to new research. The study also suggests it took the colony between 400 and 800 years to recover from each event. Researchers made this startling discovery while analyzing […]
West Antarctica Ice Sheet is Collapsing
On May 12, 2014, two papers were released which indicated that the Thwaites glacier, a major component of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, is already under collapse, possibly irreversibly. The first paper, accepted for publication in Geophysical Research Letters, was done by researchers from the University of California Irvine and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and was the subject […]
Why climate change is drying out Australia while Antarctica resists the warming trend
By developing a 1,000-year history of wind currents over the Southern Ocean, an Australian-led research has discovered the answers to two climate change-related mysteries. Firstly, why southern Australia is drying out, and secondly, why Antarctica isn’t warming as much as the rest of the planet. Their work shows that the winds encircling Antarctica have sped […]
