Antarctica had more room for ice 34 mln yrs ago than previously thought

October 1st, 2009 WASHINGTON - A team of scientists has found evidence in the form of algae and pollen grains of a sudden, remarkably warm period in Antarctica that occurred about 15.7 million years ago and lasted for a few thousand years. The evidence was found by Sophie Warny, LSU (Louisiana State University) assistant professor of geology and geophysics and curator at the LSU Museum of Natural Science, and colleagues.

September 24th, 2009 WASHINGTON - Using satellite lasers, scientists have made the most comprehensive picture of the rapidly thinning glaciers along the coastline of both the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets. Researchers from British Antarctic Survey and the University of Bristol describe how analysis of millions of NASA satellite measurements from both of these vast ice sheets shows that the most profound ice loss is a result of glaciers speeding up where they flow into the sea.

September 23rd, 2009 NASA data: Greenland, Antarctic ice melt worseningWASHINGTON — New satellite information shows that ice sheets in Greenland and western Antarctica continue to shrink faster than scientists thought and in some places are already in runaway melt mode. British scientists for the first time calculated changes in the height of the vulnerable but massive ice sheets and found them especially worse at their edges.

August 14th, 2009 LONDON - A new research has determined that one of the largest glaciers in Antarctica is thinning four times faster than it was 10 years ago. Professor Duncan Wingham of University College London (UCL) led the research team.

July 16th, 2009 WASHINGTON - A new study has concluded that significant sea ice formation occurred in the Arctic earlier than previously thought, which suggests that sea ice formed in the Arctic before it did in Antarctica. "The results are also especially exciting because they suggest that sea ice formed in the Arctic before it did in Antarctica, which goes against scientific expectation," said scientific team member Dr Richard Pearce of the University of Southampton's School of Ocean and Earth Science based at the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton (NOCS).

July 7th, 2009 SYDNEY - The melting of West Antarctic ice sheet, Antarctica's most vulnerable part, could raise global sea levels by up to five metres. "Polar ice sheets have grown and collapsed at least 40 times over the past five million years, causing major sea-level fluctuations," says Tim Naish, deputy director of Victoria University's Antarctic Research Centre (ARC).

June 21st, 2009 LONDON - Tyrannosaurus rex, the best-known predatory species, may have been far more lithe than previously thought, researchers have discovered. In a new study, boffins have claimed that dinosaurs may have been much lighter and sleeker than earlier believed because of potential flaws in the equations used to calculate their weight, reports The Times.

June 2nd, 2009 The poop on finding penguins: Follow the guanoWASHINGTON — Scientists looking for lost penguins stumbled upon an effective method: Follow their poop from space. In remote Antarctica, about one-and-a-half times bigger than the United States, researchers have been unable to figure out just where colonies of emperor penguins live and if their population is in peril.

June 2nd, 2009 LONDON - Scientists have been able to locate dozens of emperor penguin breeding colonies in Antarctica by spotting large amounts of the bird's droppings on pictures taken from space. According to a report in the Telegraph, satellite images have picked up giant red-brown stains on the pristine white sea ice, indicating the presence of thousands of penguins.

May 6th, 2009 WASHINGTON - New Antarctic seabed sonar images have revealed that the extent of ice covering the continent of Antarctica at the end of the last ice age around 10,000 years ago was much larger than it is today, which could help scientists to predict future sea-level rise. Using sonar technology from onboard ships, scientists from British Antarctic Survey (BAS) and the German Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI) captured the most extensive, continuous set of images of the seafloor around the Amundsen Sea embayment ever taken.

March 30th, 2009 WASHINGTON - In a new study, dust trapped deep in Antarctic ice sheets is helping scientists unravel details of past climate change. The study, carried out by the Universities of Edinburgh, Stirling and Lille, has found that the very coldest periods of the last ice age correspond with the dustiest periods in Antarctica's past, thus establishing a link between the two.

March 17th, 2009 WASHINGTON - In a new research, scientists have used detailed satellite data to suggest that the changing climate is affecting not just the penguins at the apex of the food chain in Antarctica, but simultaneously the microscopic life that is the base of the ecosystem. The research was carried out by scientists with the National Science Foundation's (NSF) LTER (Long Term Ecological Research) program.

February 28th, 2009 WASHINGTON - Ice in Antarctica suddenly appeared about 35 million years ago. For the previous 100 million years the continent had been essentially ice-free.

January 22nd, 2009 WASHINGTON - Antarctica is warming, despite the recent scientific consensus that the southernmost continent was not being impacted by global warming, a study published in the journal Nature said Thursday. Scientists had observed warming in the Antarctic Peninsula that extends north from the icy continent, but the rest of the continent was believed to be stable or even cooling as the rest of the Earth's continents saw temperatures increase.

January 22nd, 2009 WASHINGTON - Much of Antarctica has been warming, not getting any colder, as suspected by scientists studying climate change. The study found that warming in West Antarctica exceeded a tenth of a degree Celsius per decade for the last 50 years and more than offset the cooling in East Antarctica.