Amazing Antarctic Video Brings Ice to Life

A gorgeous new video is the best way to experience Antarctica without even feeling chilly.

The time lapse clip, produced and narrated by Cassandra Brooks, a doctoral student at Stanford University, condenses two months on an Antarctic ice-breaker into less than five minutes. Frame by frame, the video reveals how stunning sea ice can be — from polka-dot pancake ice to thick white flows.

"It was so beautiful," Brooks told LiveScience. "And it was such a neat experience to be on this crazy boat that was just screaming through the ice." [See the Video of the Antarctic Ice]

Brooks spent two months aboard the Nathaniel B. Palmer on a National Science Foundation expedition through the Ross Sea of Antarctica. Her team was investigating the release of carbon from phytoplankton blooms, which are so huge in this area that they're visible from space. During the expedition, Brooks also blogged for National Geographic.

The time lapse video was inspired, in part, by that blogging opportunity, and also by Brooks' husband, photographer John Weller.

"I happen to be married to an amazing photographer who insisted on sending me out on the boat with the right equipment," Brooks said. In this case, that equipment was a GoPro camera and a Joby GorillaPod flexible tripod, which withstood 60-knot (60 miles per hour) winds and negative 40-degree-Fahrenheit (negative 40 degrees Celsius) temperatures, she said.

Almost every day, except when the weather was simply too harsh, Brooks went to the bridge of the ship to capture images as the Palmer steered through the Ross Sea ice. The final scenes, though, were filmed from the back of the boat.

The Palmer had broken into an area called Cape Colbeck, home to a colony of emperor penguins. Another research group aboard the vessel was tagging the penguins, so the ship remain parked for several days as they did their work.

"The longer we were there the more and more penguins came. By the third day we just had it seemed like hundreds, if not thousands, of penguins just playing in our prop wash behind the boat," Brooks said.

She got the penguins on film, of course — and captured their raucous, squawking cries as well. 

"The most amazing thing for me is that every time I go to the Antarctic, I make some sort of blog or some kind of media, and I felt like this is the first time I've been able to capture it well and also really share it well," Brooks said. "It's incredibly rewarding to know that people are really feeling it and probably falling in love with the place."

Follow Stephanie Pappas on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on LiveScience.com.

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Javelin-Hurling Scientists Measure Antarctic Glacier Melt

How quickly are glaciers in Antarctica melting? Researchers are launching javelin-shaped devices out of airplanes to help answer that question and find out what's going on in some of the frozen continent's most inaccessible places.

So far, scientists have deployed about 25 of these GPS-equipped javelins in Antarctica's Pine Island Glacier, and another four on the Antarctic Peninsula, said Hilmar Gudmundsson, a researcher at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS). The javelins will automatically record and relay their positions for two to three years, allowing researchers to figure out how quickly the glacier is flowing into the ocean. Preliminary measurements show that the Pine Island Glacier's march to the sea is speeding up, Gudmundsson told OurAmazingPlanet.

The Pine Island Glacier is thinning faster than any other glacier in Antarctica, and it's important to find out why and exactly how fast, Gudmundsson said. By some estimates, this glacier alone could be responsible for about 5 percent of global sea level rise, although that is a rough calculation and varies by year, he added.

The javelins are designed to only partially embed into the ice, so that they are still able to communicate with satellites. To that end the devices are equipped with small parachutes and "ice brake" fins to keep them from disappearing beneath the ice sheet when they crash land, Gudmundsson said.

Like many glaciers in polar regions, the Pine Island Glacier's expanse of ice doesn't stop when it reaches the ocean. Instead, the ice flows into the sea, where it floats atop the water, forming a platform of ice called an ice shelf. Measurements have shown that the Antarctic Ocean is warmer than it used to be, and is melting the bottom of this ice shelf. That produces less resistance for the glacier on land, which, as a result, slides toward the ocean faster than before, Gudmundsson said.

And behind the Pine Island Glacier is an even larger section of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, one of the largest in the world. The glacier acts like a plug in a leaky dam, and if it collapses, it could have devastating consequences for global sea levels, he added.

The javelins Gudmundsson and his team have deployed allow researchers to measure areas, like this one, that are difficult to access over land. "This opens up new possibilities. We can instrument areas that were previously out of reach," he said. "These data will give us a clear picture of what's going on but will also give us a valuable data set to test our [computer] models."

Email Douglas Main or follow him @Douglas_Main. Follow us @OAPlanet, Facebook or  Google+. Original article on LiveScience's OurAmazingPlanet.

• Album: Stunning Photos of Antarctic Ice
• Antarctica: 100 Years of Exploration (Infographic)
• Antarctica's Pine Island Glacier Is Rifting | Video

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Antarctic Melt Has Increased Tenfold Over Past 1,000 Years

Summer ice melt has increased tenfold over the last millennium in the Antarctic Peninsula, with most of the melt occurring during the last several decades in conjunction with global warming, new research suggests.

Rapid melt can destabilize glaciers and ice shelves (the tongues of glaciers that float on the ocean), suggesting that there could be some dramatic collapses and a resulting increase in sea levels if the melting continues.

"What that means is that the Antarctic Peninsula has warmed to a level where even small increases in temperature can now lead to a big increase in summer ice melt," study co-author Nerilie Abram, a researcher at the Australian National University and the British Antarctic Survey, said in a statement.

The ice melt in the Antarctic Peninsula, located in the northeastern part of the continent, is almost certainly caused by human-induced climate change, said study co-author Eric Steig, an Earth and space sciences professor at the University of Washington. The peninsula is one of the fastest-warming places on the planet, and other recent research has shown that the melt season there is longer than it used to be.

To study the historic Antarctic climate, the study team drilled a 1,194-foot-long (364 meters) ice core from James Ross Island, near the northeastern tip of Antarctica.

The core provided insight into historic temperatures in Antarctica, and contained visible layers where summer snow melted and then refroze. The thickness of these layers revealed the extent of melt in the region over the past 1,000 years.

That summer melt is now at the highest levels seen over the past millennium. And while the temperature increased gradually for the first several hundred years, snowmelt dramatically increased in the latter half of the 20th century, Abram said in the statement.

The findings, detailed in the April 14 issue of the journal Nature Geoscience, suggest that the Antarctic Peninsula may now be particularly vulnerable to climate change.

The picture from an ice core drilled in West Antarctica is less clear. Similar large temperature spikes have been seen in the past there, but the picture is more complex and the exact causes are harder to tease out. It is possible that increased snowmelt there may be due to the El Niño weather pattern in the 1990s, the study authors said.

Follow Tia Ghose on Twitter @tiaghose. Follow LiveScience @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on LiveScience.com.

• Images of Melt: Earth's Vanishing Ice
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Antarctic Blue Whales Found With Sound

Whales may be the biggest animals on Earth, but finding them in the vast open ocean isn't easy.

Now, an Australia-led research team has demonstrated a novel idea for chasing down the massive marine mammals. To search for Antarctic blue whales, the group dropped sonar buoys in the Ross Sea west of Antarctica, and listened for whale calls. They triangulated the whale's location from their calls, and then sailed to the right spot.

During the research cruise, the scientists photographed 57 blue whales, collected 23 skin biopsy samples and stuck on two satellite-tracking tags. They also spotted 11 pygmy blue whales and eight humpback whales, among a total 720 cetacean species (the group that includes whales, dolphins and porpoises).

"In many respects our expectations of what we could achieve have been exceeded," the scientists wrote on the expedition's blog.

The deep, resonating song of Antarctic blue whales travels hundreds of kilometers across the Southern Ocean, Brian Miller, of the Australian Antarctic Division  and the lead marine mammal acoustician of the mission, said in a statement. The team returned with 626 hours of recordings, with 26,545 blue whale calls analyzed in real time. [See how they found the whales]

The whale's satellite tags will transmit never-before obtained data on how the whales feed near the edge of the Antarctic ice, marine biologist Virginia Andrews-Goff of the Australian Marine Mammals Center said in a statement.

The International Whaling Commission estimates the population of Antarctic blue whales is between 400 and 1,400 individuals. The leviathans were slaughtered to near extinction in the early 1900s by whalers, who took some 340,000 whales, according to a statement from the Australian government.

Researchers worldwide have used acoustic technology to track whale species for decades, including blue whales, humpback whales and right whales. This is the first time that scientists have located whales for tagging and identification by identifying their positions with sonar, the statement said.

Email Becky Oskin or follow her @beckyoskin. Follow us @OAPlanet, Facebook or Google+. Original article on LiveScience's OurAmazingPlanet.

• Image Gallery: Life at the South Pole
• In Photos: Tracking Humpback Whales
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Antarctic Thawing Season Keeps Getting Longer

More ice is melting for a longer period of time each year on the Antarctic Peninsula, new research shows.

The area is warming more quickly than almost any other spot on Earth. Temperatures on this mountainous strip of land have risen by 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit (3 degrees Celsius) since the 1950s, according to a news release from the British Antarctic Survey, whose scientists were involved in the research.

The study, published today (March 27) in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Earth Surface, analyzed data from 30 weather stations on the Antarctic Peninsula and found that not only is the temperature rising, but it's staying warmer longer, and all that warming is having an impact on the ice.

"We found a significant increase in the length of the melting season at most of the stations with the longest temperature records," said study author Nick Barrand, in a statement. "At one station, the average length of the melt season almost doubled between 1948 and 2011."

The researchers calculated that the meltwater from this thawing ice is helping to break up ice shelves connected to the peninsula, which in turn speeds up the flow of glaciers to the sea. Glaciers are essentially rivers of ice, and ice shelves are the part of a glacier that floats on the ocean water, acting as sort of a doorstop. As the flow of the glaciers speeds up, faster melting occurs and could add to global sea level rise, according to a computer model the researchers created.  

"We found that the model was very good at reproducing the pattern and timing of the melt, and changes in melting between years," Barrand said. "This increases confidence in the use of climate models to predict future changes to snow and ice cover in the Antarctic Peninsula."

Email Douglas Main or follow him @Douglas_Main. Follow us @OAPlanet, Facebook or Google+. Original article on LiveScience's OurAmazingPlanet.

• 8 Ways Global Warming Is Already Changing the World
• Antarctica: 100 Years of Exploration (Infographic)
• 8 of the World's Most Endangered Places

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US Pushes for Antarctic Marine Protections

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry called for the establishment of increased protections in two parts of the Southern Ocean around Antarctica at an event held last night (March 18) by The Pew Charitable Trusts at the National Geographic Society in Washington, D.C.

Kerry appeared with New Zealand's ambassador to the United States, Michael Moore, to make the case for the two countries' push for a marine protected area (or MPA) in Antarctica's Ross Sea. If created, it would be the largest MPA in the world.

"The Ross Sea … is a natural laboratory. And we disrespect it at our peril, as we do the rest of the ocean," Kerry said in his remarks at the event, which also screened the award-winning documentary "The Last Ocean," which highlights the Ross Sea.

The Ross Sea is teaming with life, as the home to more than 1 million pairs of Adélie penguins; 28,850 pairs of emperor penguins; 30,000 to 50,000 Weddell seals; 5.5 million Antarctic petrels and 21,000 minke whales, according to Pew. And like many parts of the Antarctic ocean environment, the Ross Sea has been left relatively unscathed by human activities, with fewer pollutants and invasive species and less large-scale fishing than in other parts of the Earth's oceans.

But global warming and increasing interest in the rich fisheries found in the Southern Ocean are putting pressure on this environment, those calling for the MPA have warned. [8 of the World's Most Endangered Places]

"The Ross Sea is one of the most pristine places left on Earth," said Joshua Reichert, executive vice president of The Pew Charitable Trusts, in a statement. "It now faces challenges, brought on in great part by the warming of the Earth's climate, that threaten to alter the fragile web of life that has endured for millennia."

At a July meeting, 24 countries and the European Union will decide whether to create the Ross Sea MPA and another MPA in East Antarctica, which was proposed by the European Union, France and Australia. The proposals will be submitted to theConservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources, an independent international body established in 1982 that reaches decisions on marine protections by consensus.

"When it comes to the Ross Sea and Antarctica, we're not going to wait for a crisis before we take action. I think we're making a smart choice now," Kerry said."We're proud to join with New Zealand and Australia, two countries that have an extraordinary understanding of the sea and commitment to protecting it, and who have been great stewards."

An effort last October to convince the commission to accept the MPA proposals failed because consensus couldn't be reached. The group will meet again from July 15-17 in Bremerhaven, Germany, to reconsider the proposals.

Follow Andrea Thompson @AndreaTOAP, Pinterest or Google+. Follow us @OAPlanet, Facebook or Google+.Original article at LiveScience's OurAmazingPlanet.

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Mysterious bacterium found in Antarctic lake

MOSCOW (AP) — A new form of microbial life has been found in water samples taken from a giant freshwater lake hidden under kilometers of Antarctic ice, Russian scientists said Monday.

Sergei Bulat and Valery Lukin said in a statement that the "unidentified and unclassified" bacterium has no relation to any of the existing bacterial types. They acknowledged, however, that extensive research of the microbe that was sealed under the ice for millions of years will be necessary to prove the find and determine the bacterium's characteristics.

New samples of water retrieved from Lake Vostok earlier this year are expected to be delivered to St. Petersburg in May aboard a Russian ship.

The Russian team reached the surface of the subglacial lake in February 2012 after more than two decades of drilling, a major achievement hailed by scientists around the world.

They touched the lake water Sunday at a depth of 12,366 feet (3,769 meters), about 800 miles (1,300 kilometers) east of the South Pole in the central part of the continent.

Scientists hope the lake might allow a glimpse into microbial life forms that existed before the Ice Age and could have survived in the dark depths of the lake, despite its high pressure and constant cold — conditions similar to those which also are believed to be found under the ice crust on Mars, Jupiter's moon Europa and Saturn's moon Enceladus.

At 250 kilometers (160 miles) long and 50 kilometers (30 miles) wide, Lake Vostok is similar in size to Lake Ontario. It is kept from freezing into a solid block by the kilometers (miles)-thick crust of ice across it that acts like a blanket, keeping in heat generated by geothermal energy underneath.

Some have voiced concern that the more than 60 tons of lubricants and antifreeze used in the drilling may contaminate the lake, but the Russian researchers have insisted that their technology is environmentally secure. They said water from the lake rushed up the borehole once the drill touched the surface and froze, safely sealing the lubricants from the lake's pristine waters.

Bulat and Lukin said the research team has done a meticulous analysis of the samples to differentiate bacteria contained in lubricants from what they hoped could be a trace of new life forms. Initial studies only spotted bacteria associated with the lubricants, but scientists said they eventually found one bacterium that didn't fall into any of the known categories.

The researchers said that the small size of the initial sample and its heavy contamination made it difficult to conduct more extensive research. They voiced hope that the new samples of clean frozen water that are to arrive in St. Petersburg this spring will make it possible to "confirm the find and, perhaps, discover new previously unknown forms of microbial life."

A U.S. team that recently touched the surface of Lake Whillans, a shallower subglacial body of water west of the South Pole, also found microbes. The scientists are yet to determine what forms of bacteria they found.

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New Type of Bacteria Reportedly Found in Buried Antarctic Lake

A new type of microbe has been found at a lake buried under Antarctica's thick ice, according to news reports. The find may unveil clues of the surrounding environment in the lake, according to scientists.

The bacteria, said to be only 86 percent similar to other types known to exist on Earth, was discovered in a water sample taken from Lake Vostok, which sits under more than 2 miles (3 kilometers) of Antarctic ice. The freshwater lakehas likely been buried, unaltered, under the ice for the past million years.

Russian scientists reportedly obtained the water samples in 2012 when they drilled all the way down to the lake's surface. They ran the bacteria's composition through a global database and were not able to find anything similar to its type. Scientists couldn't even figure out the bacteria's descendents.

"After putting aside all possible elements of contamination, DNA was found that did not coincide with any of the well-known types in the global database," said Sergey Bulat, a geneticist at the Saint Petersburg Institute of Nuclear Physics, in a quote attributed in media reports to RIA Novosti news service.

"We are calling this life form unclassified and unidentified," he added.

Understanding the environment

While the bacteria still needs to be confirmed, its potential is already drawing attention from other Antarctic scientists.

Life forms are shaped by the environment they live in, and often shape that environment in return. Finding out more about bacteria in Lake Vostok, therefore, will help researchers picture what living in the lake is like for these tiny microorganisms.

"The study of looking at the organisms and their environment is really the study of ecology," said Alison Murray, an associate research professor at the Desert Research Institute (an environmental research group based in Nevada) who also does Antarctic research herself.

"By learning more about the life forms that live in Vostok, that will probably teach us a bit about the lake itself," Murray told OurAmazingPlanet.

Murray, who is familiar with the Russian researchers' work, said the group is a "very careful team of scientists" who would have put the bacteria through several validity tests before releasing the news.

Understanding bacterial life on Earth is also considered a possible research direction for finding life on other planets, including Mars.

'If this is real, it is very exciting'

The 86 percent similarity figure, to Murray, is a plausible indicator that this could be a new type of bacteria. Since all Earthly life is related to each other in some way, anything below about 80 percent would draw concern, Murray added.

At least one other scientist, however, expressed caution about the finding, saying that more information is needed before drawing conclusions.

"If this is real, it is very exciting," Peter Doran, a microbiologist at the University of Illinois at Chicago, wrote in an e-mail to OurAmazingPlanet. He is a frequent visitor to the Arctic and Antarctica for his research.

"I would caution, though, that this type of 'press release' science is a little dangerous. It really needs to go through the rigor of peer review by other experts in the field before I'll jump on board," he said. "Having others looking at their methods and data will provide support for their conclusions."

Russian scientists successfully dug through to the buried lake again in January this year, retrieving more samples for later analysis.

Meanwhile, a British team had to call off their quest in December to dig to Lake Ellsworth, another Antarctic subglacial lake, after they encountered technical difficulties.

Follow Elizabeth Howell @howellspace. Follow OurAmazingPlanet @OAPlanet,Facebookand Google+.

• Gallery: Finding Life in a Buried Antarctic Lake
• Antarctica: 100 Years of Exploration (Infographic)
• Extreme Antarctica: Amazing Photos of Lake Ellsworth

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Satellite Spies Unusual Antarctic Sea Ice

Strong winds make for strange sea ice patterns in the Southern Hemisphere.

In the Weddell Sea along the coast of Antarctica, the sea ice stretched 124 to 186 miles (200 to 300 kilometers) north of its typical extent in January and February, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC).

A satellite image snapped Feb. 22 by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA's Terra satellite shows Antarctic sea ice tightly packed in the Weddell Sea, next to the Larsen C Ice Shelf. Ice to the north appears thin, diffuse and broken up, Walt Meier, a scientist at the NSIDC, told NASA's Earth Observatory. Though the ice is thin, the region north of the Weddell Sea typically has little or no ice at all this time of year, the Earth Observatory reported.

Cold winds driven by a persistent region of high pressure west of the Weddell Sea are responsible for the unusual ice pattern, according to the NSIDC. The high pressure means winds blow from east to north, pushing ice to the north. The wind pattern also brings cold air from the continent across the ice, keeping it from melting as it moves northward into warmer latitudes, the Earth Observatory wrote online.

Reach Becky Oskin at boskin@techmedianetwork.com. Follow her on Twitter @beckyoskin. Follow OurAmazingPlanet on Twitter @OAPlanet. We're also on Facebook and Google+.

• Record-High Antarctic Sea Ice Levels Don't Disprove Global Warming
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Watch Submarine Explore Buried Antarctic Lake

A shiny red submarine that could double for a Louisville Slugger played a critical role in confirming life abounds in a chilly Antarctic lake, NASA said today.

The robotic sub, about the size and shape of a baseball bat, was dropped down a 2,625-foot (800 meters) borehole into subglacial Lake Whillansin January. Tethered to the surface with a fiber-optic cable, the micro-submarine showed the world its first images of a buried Antarctic lake. [Watch the sub explore Lake Whillans]

"Everyone was incredibly excited to see the first images," Alberto Behar, a researcher at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said in the video. Behar led the instrument's design team, which consisted mainly of students from Arizona State University.

The sub sent back video, salinity, temperature and depth data to researchers camped on the ice surface. The video confirmed it was safe to send down more instruments to measure the lake's properties, and to collect water and soil samples, NASA said in a statement.

The search paid off: Water retrieved from subglacial Lake Whillans already shows signs of microbial life. Researchers returned to the United

States with 8 gallons (30 liters) of lake water and eight sediment cores from the lake bottom. These samples will be tested for signs of microbial life, which could shed light on extreme life that thrives in harsh environments.

The drilling operation, called the WISSARD project (Whillans Ice Stream Subglacial Access Research Drilling), began on Jan. 21 and broke through the ice on Jan. 28.

Reach Becky Oskin at boskin@techmedianetwork.com. Follow her on Twitter @beckyoskin. Follow OurAmazingPlanet on Twitter @OAPlanet. We're also on Facebook and Google+.

• Antarctic Album: Drilling Into Subglacial Lake Whillans
• Antarctica: 100 Years of Exploration (Infographic)
• Extreme Antarctica: Amazing Photos of Lake Ellsworth

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