This is the 33rd issuance of the annual assessment now known as State of the Climate, published in the Bulletin since 1996. As a supplement to the Bulletin, its foremost function is to document the status and trajectory of many components of the climate system. However, as a series, the …
Scientists have found that vast lakes and streams are widespread on the surface of Antarctica's ice sheets which may accelerate its contribution to the rise in sea-level, a new study suggests. "Our study has found that extensive networks of lakes and streams have persisted in Antarctica for decades which move …
Paris - Antarctic meltwater lakes are far more common than once thought and could destabilise glaciers, potentially lifting sea levels by metres as global warming sets in, scientists said on Wednesday. Most vulnerable are the massive, floating ice shelves that ring the Antarctic continent and help prevent inland glaciers from …
Growth in terrestrial gross primary production (GPP)—the amount of carbon dioxide that is ‘fixed’ into organic material through the photosynthesis of land plants—may provide a negative feedback for climate change. It remains uncertain, however, to what extent biogeochemical processes can suppress global GPP growth. As a consequence, modelling estimates of …
For the first time in 24 years, this report comprehensively summarizes the status — population size and population trends — of Antarctica’s five penguin species, continent-wide and in key regions. These species total at least 5.7 million breeding pairs nesting at 660 or more sites across the entire Antarctic continent. …
The Strategic Plan for Biodiversity, adopted under the auspices of the Convention on Biological Diversity, provides the basis for taking effective action to curb biodiversity loss across the planet by 2020—an urgent imperative. Yet, Antarctica and the Southern Ocean, which encompass 10% of the planet’s surface, are excluded from assessments …
The continent of Antarctica officially has a new record high temperature of 63.5 degrees, scientists from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) announced Wednesday. The record was set on March 24, 2015, at the Argentine Research Base Esperanza, located near the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula. It replaces the previous …
With 2016 being declared as the hottest year on record, the dangers of global warming on the world loom larger than ever. The massive Antarctic region serves as a measuring unit when it comes to climate change. Scientists are constantly monitoring the ice shelves for any changes – increase or …
Environmentalists' and scientists' concern over climate change and its effects are on another level altogether. With 2016 being declared as the hottest year on record, the dangers of global warming on the world loom larger than ever. The massive Antarctic region serves as a measuring unit when it comes to …
Some 14,000 km from Japan, a 33-member team is researching a wide range of issues on global warming at Showa Station, Japan’s Antarctic research center. A key pursuit in the research is how global warming is affecting the continent, premised on the notion that rising sea temperatures may be causing …
The West Antarctic Ice Sheet is one of the largest potential sources of rising sea levels. Over the past 40 years, glaciers flowing into the Amundsen Sea sector of the ice sheet have thinned at an accelerating rate, and several numerical models suggest that unstable and irreversible retreat of the …
Understanding the sources and evolution of aerosols is crucial for constraining the impacts that aerosols have on a global scale. An unanswered question in atmospheric science is the source and evolution of the Antarctic aerosol population. Original Source
Ultraviolet (UV) radiations from the Sun in the spectral range 100-280 nm react with the stratospheric atmosphere, and oxygen molecules (O2) and atoms (O) combine to produce ozone (O3). Since there are destruction processes also, the equilibrium amount is small, only a few percent of the atmosphere. However, it serves …
Mass loss from the West Antarctic ice shelves and glaciers has been linked to basal melt by ocean heat flux. The Totten Ice Shelf in East Antarctica, which buttresses a marine-based ice sheet with a volume equivalent to at least 3.5 m of global sea-level rise, also experiences rapid basal …
Proxy-based indicators of past climate change show that current global climate models systematically underestimate Holocene-epoch climate variability on centennial to multi-millennial timescales, with the mismatch increasing for longer periods. Proposed explanations for the discrepancy include ocean–atmosphere coupling that is too weak in models, insufficient energy cascades from smaller to larger …
Ice observations recorded by Antarctic explorers about 100 years ago show that the sea ice at the South Pole has barely changed in size over the last century, scientists say. Ship logbooks of explorers such as the British Captain Robert Scott and Ernest Shackleton have been used to compare where …
An Indo-Norwegian project to understand the response of Antarctic ice shelves to the global warming has begun in the less-studied areas of East Antarctica, especially the Dronning Maud Land (DML), which is characterised by loosely-connected ice shelves along the 2000-km-long coast. Ice shelves of East Antarctica are poorly understood when …
Fossilised leaves recovered from a crater lake in New Zealand provided insight on how climate changed and affected the Antarctic ice-sheet 23 million years ago, a scientist said on Thursday. The leaf fossils found at Foulden Maar, in the Otago region of South Island, held evidence of a sharp increase …
Understanding the causes of recent climatic trends and variability in the high-latitude Southern Hemisphere is hampered by a short instrumental record. Here, we analyse recent atmosphere, surface ocean and sea-ice observations in this region and assess their trends in the context of palaeoclimate records and climate model simulations. Over the …
In January 1998, the collaborative ice-drilling project between Russia, the United States, and France at the Russian Vostok station in East Antarctica yielded the deepest ice core ever recovered, reaching a depth of 3,623 m. Ice cores are unique with their entrapped air inclusions enabling direct records of past changes …
