In 2016, the world’s 2nd largest emperor penguin colony had been wiped out overnight. Thousands of emperor penguin chicks drowned after an ice shelf in Antarctica collapsed. In the years following the catastrophic collapse of the ice shelf at Halley Bay, Scientists have concluded that no breeding has been detected in the area since. On average, approximately 15,000 to 24,000 […]
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When an El Nino hits, the lives of penguins are in peril. During the 1997 El Nino the penguin population fell by a third. During Climate Change a difference in temperature of at least one degree can be a life and death situation for penguins. Researchers followed a group of about 15 breeding penguins from 1992 to 2010 on the […]
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In southern Australia, it’s raining spiders. Spiders can ride the wind using an ingenious migration technique known as ballooning. Residents of Goulburn, Australia, received a startling demonstration of the phenomenon last week, when hundreds of thousands of tiny spiders descended from the sky on gossamer parachutes. “The whole place was covered in these little black spiderlings, and when I looked […]
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New South Wales and southern Queensland are going to be suffering from warmer weather and less rain than in the past. This temperature change is called “sudden stratospheric warming.” It happens when the air above the South Pole starts to warm up rapidly. Predictions are that the warming of Antarctic will likely be higher than a previous record high in […]
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The waters off the west coast of Antarctica has started to warm up over the past 50 years. The temperature has risen about 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit, warmer than the average water temperature worldwide. It has reached the temperature of 34 degrees which is warm enough for king crab to survive. Normally the king crab live on the continental slopes and […]
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Leonid Ivanovich Rogozov was a Soviet general practitioner who took part in the sixth Soviet Antarctic Expedition in 1960–1961. He was the only doctor stationed at the Novolazarevskaya Station and, while there, developed appendicitis, which meant he had to perform an appendectomy on himself, a famous case of self-surgery. Leonid Rogozov was born in Dauriya Station, Chita Oblast, a remote […]
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Results from a new climate reconstruction of how Antarctica’s ice sheets responded during the last period when atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) reached levels like those expected to occur in about 30 years, plus sediment core findings reported in a companion paper, suggest that the ice sheets are more vulnerable to rising atmospheric CO2 than previously thought. Details appear in two […]
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Scientists believe is a new whale species is doing the exact opposite of other whales. It is being as heard as it is seen. Recordings taken near the polar continent captured a strange, never-before-heard whale sound — a signal they are calling “Antarctic BW29”. Researchers say that they located the signal 1,000 times in 14 separate recordings. The unique sounds […]
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In 2016, a Canadian novelist, Craig Russell — who is also a lawyer and a theater director in Manitoba — wrote an environmental cli-fi thriller titled “Fragment” about a major calving event along the ice shelf of Antarctica. The Yale Climate Connections website recently recommended the novel, published by Thistledown Press as a good summer read. Ironically, scientists in Antarctica are […]
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The Pine Island Glacier has been melting due to a volcano heat source that researchers have found underneath the glacier in Antarctica. The volcanic activity was first noticed in 2007 and then verified in 2014. This volcanic activity was discovered by some scientists at the University of Rhode Island’s Graduate School of Oceanography. From January to March of 2014 scientists […]
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