1. The first confirmed sighting of the continent was in 1820. 2. Explorers first reached the South Pole in 1911. 3. Because Antarctica lies in the southern hemisphere, seasons there are the opposite of seasons in the north — summer runs from October to February and winter covers the remainder of the year. 4. Antarctica is the coldest continent; temperatures […]
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The warming of the world’s oceans is penetrating radar. They discovered two causing a glacier the size of California in massive undersea valleys beneath the East Antarctica to melt, and scientists fear ice sheet, one of which is 3 miles wide, its collapse could eventually cause global Those canyons allow warm, salty water sea levels to rise by as much […]
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Scientists have long puzzled over the origins of Earth’s vast oceans. Now, new data from the Rosetta spacecraft appear to have crossed one potential source off the list: comets. Rosetta has been in close orbit around comet 67P/Churyumov- Gerasimenko since August, analyzing its chemical makeup. Among the mission’s goals was to determine if the water locked in the comet’s icy […]
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According to NASA and NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) due to the warmer weather, the ozone hole has measured its smallest size on record over Antarctica. This has happened three times in the last 40 years where the weather conditions have caused the ozone depletion to slow. Even though this is good news it is not a sign that […]
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Satellites have revealed that there may be a Motte and Bailey Castle in the icecap of Antarctica. It shows an Antarctica castle shaped formation that is about 400 feet across and could be man made in the deepest outreaches of Antarctica. Civilizations may have lived in the polar region many years before the actual discovery in the 1800’s. Humans may […]
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Even in a world where extreme weather is becoming more common, said Sarah Lyall in The New York Times, the past week has been truly bizarre. In China, now suffering through its coldest, harshest winter in memory, the roofs of houses in Xinjiang collapsed under the weight of deep snow. It was so hot in Australia, meanwhile, that forecasters added […]
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Soil frost is a nearly universal process in the Arctic. In a recent dissertation by doctoral student Marina Becher at Umeå University, it is shown that the frequency and extent of Arctic soil frost is important for the release of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide from arctic soil. Soil in the Arctic has for thousands of years gathered large quantities […]
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The amount of plastic garbage in the North Pacific Ocean has risen a hundredfold since the 1970s, and the floating debris is now so abundant that marine life is adapting to its presence. Researchers from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography sampled an expanse of the sea between Hawaii and California, where currents tend to deposit flotsam from around the Pacific […]
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NASA researchers will present new findings on a wide range of Earth and space science topics at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union Dec. 14-18 in San Francisco. NASA-related briefings will be carried live on the agency’s website. Media registration is open for the event, which will be held at the Moscone Convention Center at 747 Howard St. […]
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