News

Fast-rising temperatures on the Antarctic Peninsula are having an impact on the ice and marine life, and providing clues about future ecosystem changes elsewhere.

The Indonesian peat fires that have been choking cities across Southeast Asia with a yellow haze are creating more than a local menace—burning peat releases immense stores of CO2, contributing to global warming.

The lines of data are slowly creeping across our Ross Ice Shelf GIS map and with each new line comes an improved understanding of Ross Ice Shelf. What can you learn from a ‘snapshot’ of data? A radar contains a nice story.

Ancient faults that formed in the ocean floor millions of years ago are feeding earthquakes today along stretches of the Alaska Peninsula, and likely elsewhere, a new study suggests.

The Ross Ice Shelf is much like the Rosetta Stone. The historic stone inscribed in three scripts told the same story but in different tongues, so when matched together scholars could decode an ancient language. The Antarctic Rosetta Project also brings together three different “scripts,” each written by an Earth system; the ice, the ocean and the underlying bed each have a story to tell.

Jeff Bowman, a postdoctoral research scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, is in Antarctica for the field season studying how phytoplankton and bacteria interact. Follow his reports from Palmer Station.

This year is shaping up to be the warmest year on record since 1880, according to new data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. And, perhaps not so coincidentally, a new poll says more people in the United States are coming around to the view that climate change is happening.

We finished our work at the river transect. Now we had one more sample to collect. Alamgir had arranged for drillers at this new site, but they were delayed because of a knife fight between two villages over some property.

The success of the tube wells for drilling and obtaining samples was a great boon to our field program. We drilled three additional tube wells to complete a five-well transect across the abandoned river valley. When we date the samples, we will find out if the river switched position suddenly, possibly from an earthquake.

Aboard a ship at the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, scientists are studying how the deepest and coldest waters mix with shallower waters, gaining heat in the process.

El Niño is earth’s most powerful climate cycle, influencing weather and affecting crops, water supplies and public health globally. What may be the strongest El Niño ever measured is now getting underway, and is already affecting parts of the world.

The resistivity testing was hampered by bad roads and flooded fields. The augering was proving similarly difficult in the thick muds of the abandoned channel. It was time to change to our alternative plan: drilling with tube wells. That worked better and we had turned a corner.