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Geology News
Antarctic Current Events

Two articles, one recent and one from about a year ago, describe the capture and explain the autopsy plan for the world’s largest squid. It weighs nearly 1/2 ton and was over 30 feet long. It died shortly after capture but has been stored in near-frozen salt water for the past year in New Zealand.

NASA Image

An archive of NASA news releases, image galleries and articles on a variety of topics related to planetary geology, earth observation, global climate change, monitoring volcanoes, looking beyond our solar system, monitoring the oceans and more. A few of the most popular ones are:

• Monitoring Volcanoes from Space
• Photograph of Avalanches on Mars
• Glacial Sediments Add to Louisiana Coastal Subsidence
• Satellite Images of Marine Phytoplankton Blooms
• Sahara Dust Storms Lower Sea Surface Temperatures
• Satellite Measures Pollution From East Asia to North America

Researchers surveying Antarctic waters have discovered a multitude of creepy sea beasts, many of them new to science. National Geographic has an interesting photo gallery of some of these creatures.

Earth Observatory has a satellite image pair showing before and after scenes of the Wilkins Ice Shelf collapse. A huge iceberg (25 miles x 1.5 miles) dropped from the shelf.

A huge iceberg (25 miles x 1.5 miles) appears to have dropped from the Wilkins Ice Shelf. Scientists now think that the rest of the shelf - about the size of Northern Ireland - is at risk of collapse.

Scientists are puzzled by a pair of odd meteorites. The meteorites are the first of their kind to be discovered, and nobody is certain where they came from.

CIA Image

Students and faculty from North Carolina State University are doing environmental field work in Antarctica. They have been posting lots of photos and short reports about their work and experience on their “Wolfpack in Antarctica” blog. They have been posting since January and their trip ends on March 17th.

Phytoplankton are microscopic plants that grow in the sunlit surface waters of the ocean. When enough phytoplankton grow in one place, the bloom can be seen from space. This collection of NASA images features worldwide phytoplankton blooms.

BBC science producer Martin Redfern visits the Antarctic for a month and keeps a journal of his experiences. It’s an interesting read with lots of nice pictures…check it out!

University of California Davis researchers have new information from a 2.5 million-year sequence of sediment collected from the floor of the Ross Sea as part of Operation Deep Freeze over 40 years ago. They believe that it is one of the best paleomagnetic records from the Ross Sea.

Scientists from British Antarctic Survey, Durham University and Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research collected boulders deposited by three glaciers in the Amundsen Sea Embayment. They are going to study how much they have been altered by high energy cosmic rays while being exposed on the ice sheet. The data can be used to learn about the rate of ice sheet movement.

In contrast to the Arctic, countries claiming parts of Antarctica are not making much of a display over who might own what parts of the sea floor. The difference might be that there are treaties designating Antarctica as a nature reserve.

The Southern Ocean is believed to play significant roles in determining the climate of Earth. The ocean is thought to serve as a “carbon pump” where algal blooms hundreds of miles across can develop and then drift or sink to the ocean depths.

NASA Image

Ice loss in Antarctica increased by 75 percent in the last 10 years due to a speed-up in the flow of its glaciers and is now nearly as great as that observed in Greenland.

The National Science Foundation’s West Antarctic Ice Sheet Divide Ice Core Project has recovered a 580 meter (1900 foot) ice core. This core is expected to yield a detailed record of greenhouse gases in Earth’s atmosphere over the last 100,000 years.

CIA Image

The Australian research ship, Aurora Australis, is looking for life deep in the Southern Ocean with trawling nets and underwater cameras. Their goal is to take a census of life forms in waters as deep as 2,000 meters below the surface.

A British Antarctic Survey team starts exploring an ancient lake that is 3.2 kilometers beneath the Antarctica ice sheet. This lake is over 100 meters deep and has an area of about 18 square kilometers. The exploration could eventually reveal microbial life and climate records.

Scientists of the British Antarctic Survey discovered evidence of a volcanic eruption that occurred beneath the Antarctic ice sheet about 2,000 years ago.

“The National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) have jointly achieved a new milestone in the almost 20-year history of scientific ballooning in Antarctica, by launching and operating three long-duration sub-orbital flights within a single Southern-Hemisphere summer. … they are using high balloons to investigate the nature of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays and searching for anti-matter in air currents that circle Antarctica.” Quoted from the NSF source.

The National Science Foundation has awarded a $4.5 million dollar grant to establish the Polar Earth Observing Network. They will place GPS trackers and seismic sensors in West Antarctica. These will monitor interactions between the ice and the earth below, then transmit the data to researchers via satellite.

While other nations are trying to stake their claims in the Arctic, Britain is preparing a proposal to the United Nations that it hopes will land claim to about 385,000 square miles of sea floor near the Falkland Islands and South Georgia.

Data from ESA’s Envisat satellite shows that the Ozone Hole over Antarctica is 30 percent smaller than the record size measured in 2006. Researchers say that this is not a long term trend. Instead it is caused by natural variations in temperature and atmospheric dynamics.