antarctic

Animal life was not what scientists were expecting to find in the pitch-black seawater beneath almost half a mile of floating Antarctic ice, but it seems to have found a way with the discovery of sea creatures living in the extreme environment.

Sea spiders are marine anthropods that can grow as large as a dinner plate and breathe through hundreds of pores. The New York Times takes a deep dive into sea spider research, which is teaching scientists about climate change.

Since leaders first started talking about tackling the problem of climate change, the world has spewed more heat-trapping gases, gotten hotter and suffered hundreds of extreme weather disasters. Fires have burned, ice has melted and seas have grown. The first United Nations diplomatic conference to tackle climate change was in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. Here’s what’s happened to Earth...

Airbnb is offering a handful of people concerned about the environment a chance to participate in scientific research on how to help preserve it during an all-expense-paid trip to Antarctica. The Antarctic Sabbatical, as the travel company is dubbing it, will give five people the opportunity to study how widely microplastics have infiltrated the region. Over a month’s time in...

The amount of ice circling Antarctica is suddenly plunging from a record high to record lows, baffling scientists. Floating ice off the southern continent steadily increased from 1979 and hit a record high in 2014. But three years later, the annual average extent of Antarctic sea ice hit its lowest mark, wiping out three-and-a-half decades of gains — and then...

The unmanned yellow submarine named Boaty McBoatface in a public vote in Britain three years ago discovered a link between Antarctic winds and rising sea temperatures, a significant climate change finding, on its first mission, NBC News reported. Boaty collected water temperature, saltiness and turbulence data over 111.85 miles of mountainous underwater valleys that reached as deep as 2.5 miles....

The unmanned yellow submarine named Boaty McBoatface in a public vote in Britain three years ago discovered a link between Antarctic winds and rising sea temperatures, a significant climate change finding, on its first mission, NBC News reported. Boaty collected water temperature, saltiness and turbulence data over 111.85 miles of mountainous underwater valleys that reached as deep as 2.5 miles....

An enormous void six miles long and 1,000 feet deep has been discovered under an Antarctic glacier, raising the prospect that the ice sheet is melting faster than scientists realized, NBC News reported. The cavity under the Thwaites Glacier was discovered through analysis of data gathered by satellites and aircraft equipped with ice-penetrating radar. It was described in a Jan....

Japan announced Wednesday that it is leaving the International Whaling Commission to resume commercial hunts for the animals for the first time in 30 years, but said it would no longer go to the Antarctic for its much-criticized annual killings. Japan switched to what it calls research whaling after the IWC imposed a moratorium on commercial whaling in the 1980s,...

Earth’s protective ozone layer is finally healing from damage caused by aerosol sprays and coolants, a new United Nations report said. The ozone layer had been thinning since the late 1970s. Scientist raised the alarm and ozone-depleting chemicals were phased out worldwide. As a result, the upper ozone layer above the Northern Hemisphere should be completely repaired in the 2030s...

A sea creature nicknamed the “headless chicken monster” was seen near Antarctica on a long-line fishing company’s underwater camera system. The bizarre-looking creature is actually a sea cucumber.

Some of the world’s biggest cities are facing a shortage of drinking water, but an engineering firm in the Middle East is moving to try to fix that by towing icebergs from the Antarctic to the world’s most water-starved regions, NBC News reported. The United Arab Emirates-based firm, National Adviser Bureau, plans to begin a pilot in November, using satellite...

President Donald Trump’s description of the climate on planet Earth doesn’t quite match what data show and scientists say. In an interview with Piers Morgan airing Sunday on Britain’s ITV News, the president said the world was cooling and warming at the same time and that claims of melting ice caps haven’t come true.

NASA captured 20 years of changing seasons in a striking new global map of the home planet. The data visualization, released this week, shows Earth’s fluctuations as seen from space. The polar ice caps and snow cover are shown ebbing and flowing with the seasons. The varying ocean shades of blue, green, red and purple depict the abundance — or...

Almost the entire cohort of chicks from an Adelie penguin colony in the eastern Antarctic was wiped out by starvation last summer in what scientists say is only the second such incident in over 40 years. Researchers said Sunday the mass die-off occurred because unusually large amounts of sea ice forced penguin parents to travel farther in search of food...

An iceberg the size of a Great Lake broke away from the Larsen C ice shelf in Antartica on Monday, July 11, 2017. Scientists say the iceberg won’t raise the sea level, but cannot say whether or not the massive breakage was caused by human activity.

A huge iceberg the size of a Great Lake, one of the largest ever, split from an ice shelf in Antarctica sometime since Monday, according to researchers tracking its progress. The iceberg weighs more than a trillion tonnes, is larger than Rhode Island and contains twice the volume of Lake Erie, according to scientists with Project MIDAS, a British research...

Scientists say a crack along a key floating ice shelf in Antarctica indicates that a vast iceberg is close to breaking off, NBC News reported. The process, known as calving, happens periodically but researchers are watching closely to see if climate change is affecting the phenomenon. Scientists at the University of Swansea in Britain said Thursday the rift in the...

An ailing Buzz Aldrin, the second man to walk on the moon, was evacuated from the South Pole to New Zealand where he was in a hospital on Friday in stable condition. Aldrin, 86, was visiting Antarctica as a tourist when he fell ill. He was flown to Christchurch from McMurdo Station, a U.S. research center on the Antarctic coast....