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.

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.

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.

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.

Rob Robbins and Steve Rupp have been diving under the Antarctic sea ice for a combined 60 years. Hang around their dive headquarters at McMurdo Station and you’ll see rows of oxygen tanks, wetsuits, and breathing apparatus.

Scientists say they have discovered compelling evidence that diamonds exist in the icy mountains of Antarctica.

Parts of ancient Antarctica were as warm as today’s California coast, and polar regions of the southern Pacific Ocean registered 21st-century Florida heat, according to scientists using a new way to measure past temperatures.

Scientists are monitoring an iceberg roughly six times the size of Manhattan - one of the largest now in existence - that broke off from an Antarctic glacier and is heading into the open ocean.

Canadian author Matt Chatelain's video trailer for The Vostok Juncture promises adventure and intrigue. We help authors from around the world put their ideas into words.

Scientists have revealed that Earth's mantle under Antarctica is at a lower viscosity and moving at such a rapid rate it is changing the shape of the land at a rate that can be recorded by GPS. They have explained for the first time why the upward motion of Earth's crust in the Northern Antarctic Peninsula is currently taking place so quickly.

Teams of scientists say the long-feared collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet has begun, kicking off what's likely to be a centuries-long process that could raise sea levels by as much as 15 feet.

Seven countries have laid claim to parts of Antarctica and many more have a presence there - why do they all want a piece of this frozen wasteland? I pick a path between rock pools and settle my bottom on a boulder. A spectacular, silent view unfolds across a mountain-fringed bay. Then there is a flash in the shallows by my feet - an arrow of white and black.

Behind the Argentina's Esperanza Base, on the Antarctic peninsula, it's possible to stand on a cliff and look down on a colony of 250 000 Adelie penguins. This area, the most frequented by penguins going to and from the sea, changes its appearance daily, depending on snowfall, blooms of algae in the ice, or the colors that the penguins drag along with their feet.

An incredible ice-berg wave, frozen in time, hangs delicately over the serene waters of Paradise Harbour along the Antarctic Peninsula. The textures in this berg were breathtaking. By Tim McCullough.

Iceberg collapsed a couple of seconds, no injuries

Scientists have pulled up thousands of different types of micro-organisms from Lake Whillans, a large body of water buried 800m under the ice sheet.

Researchers have for the first time extensively mapped Greenland's and Antarctica's ice sheets with the help of the ESA satellite CryoSat-2 and have thus been able to prove that the ice crusts of both regions momentarily decline at an unprecedented rate. In total the ice sheets are losing around 500 cubic kilometers of ice per year.

More than 9,000 species, from single-cell organisms to penguins and whales, are chronicled in the first Antarctic atlas since 1969.

A new study just published shows that—using more accurate measurements than ever before—Greenland and Antarctica are together losing ice at incredible rates: Together, over 500 (±107) cubic kilometers of ice are melting from them every year.

Scientists say the extent of Antarctic sea ice cover is at its highest level since records began. Satellite imagery reveals an area of about 20 million square kilometres covered by sea ice around the Antarctic continent.