Researchers journey to remote Antarctic island in search of an answer

Watch a lone penguin flee a pod of killer whales in Antarctica and escape by jumping into a sightseeing boat full of tourists. The post Penguin Escapes Killer Whales by Jumping into Sightseeing Boat appeared first on Nerdist.

It comes days after Earth's warmest January on record.

Joe Pettit is a person of contradictions. A lover of solitude who manages teams, an engineer who writes poetry and paints, a family man who spends several months a year on remote Antarctic glaciers, installing delicate scientific instruments. It’s a rare mixture of qualities to find anywhere in the world—except, perhaps, in Antarctica.

In the last few days of 2018, as the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard, Norway, lay cloaked in the long darkness of polar night, a shrimp trawler called the Northguider ran aground off the coast of one of the islands.

Melting of the Antarctic ice sheet will cause sea level rises of about two and a half metres around the world, even if the goals of the Paris agreement are met, research has shown. The melting is likely to take place over a long period, beyond the end of this century, but is almost certain to be irreversible, because of the way in which the ice cap is likely to melt, the new model reveals.

Scientists may just have identified Thwaites Glacier's Achilles heel. This Antarctic colossus is melting at a rapid rate, dumping billions of tonnes of ice in the ocean every year and pushing up global sea-levels. Now, a UK-US team has surveyed the deep seafloor channels in front of the glacier that almost certainly provide the access for warm water to infiltrate and attack Thwaites' underside.

Thwaites glacier is losing ice at an accelerating rate, threatening catastrophic sea-level rise

While you may not have been quite this isolated over the last few months, reentry into life after lockdown might be bumpier than you expect.

It's not grass growing along the Antarctic Peninsula. The culprits are a lot smaller.

Snow algae bloom along the coast of Antarctica and are likely to be biogeochemically important. Here, the authors produced the first map of such blooms, show that they are driven by warmer temperatures and proximity to birds and mammals, and are likely to increase given projected climate changes.

Antarctica and Greenland lost thousands of gigatons of ice in the last 16 years, according to results

When paleontologist Thomas Mörs was peering into a microscope while sorting through tiny 40 million-year-old fossils unearthed on Seymour Island near the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula, he came across quite a surprise - hip and skull bones of a frog.

The loss of summer sea ice in the Arctic is now very likely before 2050, new research shows, even if the carbon emissions driving the climate crisis are cut rapidly. The result has alarmed scientists but they said slashing greenhouse gases remained vital as this would determine whether Arctic summer ice vanished permanently or could recover over time. If emissions remain very high, there is a risk the Arctic could be ice-free even in the dark, cold winter months, a possibility described as “catastrophic”.

While the world rightfully focuses on the COVID-19 pandemic, the planet is still warming. This summer's Antarctic weather, as elsewhere in the world, was unprecedented in the observed record.

In the last 22 years, one giant glacier in Antarctica has retreated almost three miles. If it fully thaws, sea levels would rise almost 5 feet.

After a month of record-breaking temperatures, a kind of snow algae that turns ruby-hued in warm temperatures thrives.

It's the third major melt event of the 2019-2020 Southern Hemisphere summer, NASA says.

"I haven't seen melt ponds develop this quickly in Antarctica," one scientist said.

The Antarctic has registered a temperature of more than 20C (68F) for the first time on record, prompting fears of climate instability in the world’s greatest repository of ice. The 20.75C logged by Brazilian scientists at Seymour Island on 9 February was almost a full degree higher than the previous record of 19.8C, taken on Signy Island in January 1982.