Eideard

Scientists say they can now explain the existence of what are perhaps Earth’s most extraordinary mountains.

The Gamburtsevs are the size of the European Alps and yet they are totally buried beneath the Antarctic ice. Their discovery in the 1950s was a major surprise. Most people had assumed the rock bed deep within the continent would be flat and featureless.

Survey data now suggests the range first formed over a billion years ago, researchers tell the journal Nature.

The Gamburtsevs are important because they are thought to be the location where the ice sheet we know today initiated its march across Antarctica. Unravelling the mountains’ history will therefore inform climate studies, helping scientists to understand not just past changes on Earth but possible future scenarios as well…

This multinational effort in 2008/2009 flew aircraft back and forth across the east of the White Continent, mapping the shape of the hidden mountain system using ice-penetrating radar. Other instruments recorded the local gravitational and magnetic fields, while seismometers were employed to probe the deep Earth.

The AGAP team believes all this data can now be meshed into a credible narrative for the Gamburtsevs’ creation and persistence through geological time…

“This research really solves the mystery of how you can have young-looking mountains in the middle of an old continent,” said US principal investigator Dr Robin Bell from the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University.

“In this case, the original Gamburtsevs probably completely eroded away only to come back, phoenix-like. They’ve had two lives,” she told BBC News…

The search also goes on for a suitable place in the range to drill for ancient ice.

By examining bubbles of air trapped in compacted snow, it is possible for researchers to glean details about past environmental conditions, including temperature and the concentration of gases in the atmosphere such as carbon dioxide.

Somewhere in the Gamburtsev region there ought to be a location where ices can be retrieved that are more than a million years old. This would be at least 200,000 years older than the most ancient Antarctic ice cores currently in the possession of scientists.

RTFA. Please. Another interesting addition to paleo-climatology and geology.

Thanks, Ursarodinia

Click to enlarge

Scientists have produced what they say is the first complete map of how the ice moves across Antarctica.
Built from images acquired by radar satellites, the visualisation details all the great glaciers and the smaller ice streams that feed them…

It should aid the understanding of how the White Continent might evolve in the warmer world being forecast by climatologists.

“This is like seeing a map of all the oceans’ currents for the first time. It’s a game changer for glaciology,” said lead author Dr Eric Rignot. “We are seeing amazing flows from the heart of the continent that had never been described before”…

The map incorporates billions of radar data points collected between 1996 and 2009 by satellites belonging to Europe, Canada and Japan.

Ice drains from the interior via huge glaciers that calve icebergs into the sea…Ice velocities on the new map range from just few cm/year near places where the ice divides into different paths, to km/year on fast-moving glaciers and the ice shelves that float out from the edges of the continent.

RTFA for history and details. Interesting stuff.

The belly of Antarctica has given up a little more of its mystery. Survey data taken across a great swathe of the east of the white continent has allowed scientists to map the shape of the bedrock buried deep under the ice.

It reveals in new detail a huge trough hundreds of kilometres long that is cut by fjord-like features.

Researchers tell Nature magazine that this hidden landscape was probably moulded by the action of glaciers more than 14 million years ago. This was a time when Antarctica was only part way through acquiring the extensive ice covering we know today.

The team behind the survey work believes its data will improve not only our understanding of Antarctica’s past but also its future, as the continent contends with a potentially much warmer world…

The new findings have emerged from the Investigating the Cryospheric Evolution of the Central Antarctic Plate (Icecap) project, an international effort to comprehend how the East Antarctic Aurora Subglacial Basin has been shaped over the past 35 million years…

The team used a refurbished 1942 DC-3 plane to gather its data. Packed with instruments, it took off from Casey Station on the coast and flew long lines that traced out a great fan across the basin.

Ice-penetrating radar on the underside of the plane looked through the cap to build a picture of the rock bed.

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Culminating a decade of planning, innovation and testing, construction of the world’s largest neutrino observatory, installed in the ice of the Antarctic plateau at the geographic South Pole, was successfully completed December 18, 2010, New Zealand time.

The last of 86 holes had been drilled and a total of 5,160 optical sensors are now installed to form the main detector–a cubic kilometer of instrumented ice–of the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, located at the National Science Foundation’s Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station.

From its vantage point at the end of the world, IceCube provides an innovative means to investigate the properties of fundamental particles that originate in some of the most spectacular phenomena in the universe.

In the deep, dark, stillness of the Antarctic ice, IceCube records the rare collisions of neutrinos–elusive sub-atomic particles–with the atomic nuclei of the water molecules of the ice. Some neutrinos come from the sun, while others come from cosmic rays interacting with the Earth’s atmosphere and dramatic astronomical sources such as exploding stars in the Milky Way and other distant galaxies. Trillions of neutrinos stream through the human body at any given moment, but they rarely interact with regular matter, and researchers want to know more about them and where they come from…

The successful completion of the observatory is also a milestone for international scientific cooperation on the southernmost continent. In addition to researchers at universities and research labs in the U.S., Belgium, Germany and Sweden–the countries that funded the observatory–IceCube data are analyzed by the larger IceCube Collaboration, which also includes researchers from Barbados, Canada, Japan, New Zealand, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.

An amazing project – illustrating the potential for collaborative work between nations as much as interdisciplinary cooperation between scientific specialties.

RTFA to appreciate the complexity. Stay in touch with the researchers turning this venture into serious work and knowledge.

Anthony Dubber, from Hertfordshire, quit his job working in a hotel to spend two 18 month periods as a chef with the Survey team located at Halley in Antarctica.

He braved 45mph winds and -35 degree temperatures as well as surviving 105 days of total darkness…

In September 2007 he wrote: “The start of September bought the last shimmers of light during the night. It would be the finale of the Aurora Australis, and very soon the last sightings of Antarctica’s night star constellations, as the daylight starts rapidly taking grasp over the darkness of night.

“As the nights are quickly drawing to an end, I find myself reminiscing about the luminous starry skies that glistened above us, during our siege of 24 hour darkness.”

The Aurora Australis or Southern Lights are mesmerizing, dynamic displays of light that appear in the Antarctic skies in winter. Aurora results from the interaction of the solar wind with the Earth’s magnetic field.

Lovely photo, must have been a lifetime experience.

I’ve only known a few folks who spent significant time living and working in Antarctica. One, in fact, an Iranian-American who spent the original International Geophysical Year – which was two years long – working and defining what became known as ice geology. Not a garrulous type, I still managed to get him aside once in a while and draw out tales of nature and beauty and the very early science being derived from ice cores.

Thousands of years of data recorded in ice

Researchers here are hopeful that the new core they drilled through an ice field on the Antarctic Peninsula will contain ice dating back into the last ice age. If so, that record should give new insight into past global climate changes.

The expedition in early winter to the Bruce Plateau, an ice field straddling a narrow ridge on the northernmost tongue of the southernmost continent, yielded a core that was 445.6 meters long, the longest yet recovered from that region of Antarctica. And while remarkably successful, the field work tested the researchers’ resilience more than most of their previous expeditions.

“It was the field season from hell,” explained Ellen Mosley-Thompson, professor of geography at Ohio State University and leader of the project. “Everything that could go wrong did, and almost everything that could break did.”

Bad weather delayed their transport to the remote drill site and snowstorms were a recurrent problem, preventing support flights in to the team. Twice, their drills became stuck deep in the ice, a drill motor broke and all three of the drill gearboxes failed, causing them to cannibalize those devices to construct a new one.

RTFA. It would make a fine documentary of the dedication and inventive spirit required of researchers working in the extremes our planet offers. The questions asked are as important as the ingenuity needed to get the samples.

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The world’s southernmost wind farm has been opened in Antarctica, the first in what could be a number of renewable energy projects aimed to lower the frozen continent’s reliance on diesel for power.

The construction of the three-turbine Ross Island wind farm was a huge challenge in an environment where the temperature can fall as low as -57 degrees Celsius.

The wind farm will supply about 11 percent of the power to New Zealand’s Scott Base and the American McMurdo Station, and will cut diesel consumption by about 463,000 liters per year.

If the wind farm proves a success it could be followed by others, with solar generation also being evaluated for potential use, said Scott Bennett, project manager with Meridian Energy, the state-owned New Zealand power company which built and runs the turbines.

Every little bit helps. Once they get more experience they can always expand.

Just imagine the cost of shipping in diesel to Antarctica.

Penguins that died 44,000 years ago in Antarctica have provided extraordinary frozen DNA samples that challenge the accuracy of traditional genetic aging measurements, and suggest those approaches have been routinely underestimating the age of many specimens by 200 to 600 percent.

In other words, a biological specimen determined by traditional DNA testing to be 100,000 years old may actually be 200,000 to 600,000 years old, researchers suggest in a new report in Trends in Genetics, a professional journal…

“Some earlier work based on small amounts of DNA indicated this same problem, but now we have more conclusive evidence based on the study of almost an entire mitochondrial genome,” said Dee Denver, an evolutionary biologist with the Center for Genome Research and Biocomputing at Oregon State University.

“The observations in this report appear to be fundamental and should extend to most animal species,” he added. “We believe that traditional DNA dating techniques are fundamentally flawed, and that the rates of evolution are in fact much faster than conventional technologies have led us to believe…”

“For the genetic analysis to be accurate, however, you must have the right molecular clock rate,” Denver said. “We now think that many genetic changes were happening that conventional DNA analysis did not capture. They were fairly easy to use and apply but also too indirect, and inaccurate as a result.”

RTFA. Start with finding a spot where penguins have been nesting, living and dying for 44,000 years. Talk about stuck in a neighborhood!

A new historical record of carbon dioxide levels suggests current political targets on climate may be “playing with fire”, scientists say.

Researchers used ocean sediments to plot CO2 levels back 20 million years. Levels similar to those now commonly regarded as adequate to tackle climate change were associated with sea levels 25-40m (80-130 ft) higher than today.

The last 800,000 years have been mapped relatively well from ice cores drilled in Antarctica, where historical temperatures and atmospheric content have left a series of chemical clues in the layers of ice. But looking back further has been more problematic; and the new record contains much more precise estimates of historical records than have been available before for the 20 million year timeframe…

In the intervening millennia, CO2 concentrations have been much lower; in the last few million years they cycled between 180ppm and 280ppm in rhythm with the sequence of ice ages and warmer interglacial periods. Now, humanity’s emissions of greenhouse gases are pushing towards the 400ppm range, which will very likely be reached within a decade.

“What we have shown is that in the last period when CO2 levels were sustained at levels close to where they are today, there was no icecap on Antarctica and sea levels were 25-40m higher,” said research leader Aradhna Tripati from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA).

According to Jonathan Overpeck, who co-chaired the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) work on ancient climates for the organisation’s last major report in 2007, this provides a more accurate look at how past CO2 values relate to climate than previous methods.

“This is yet another paper that makes the future look more scary than previously thought by many,” said the University of Arizona scientist. “If anyone still doubts the link between CO2 and climate, they should read this paper.”

Does anyone expect our politicians or professional skeptics to read something other than their poll numbers? These are people who think they’re doing serious forecasting when they look at projections three quarters out.

NASA and the National Science Foundation have successfully launched and demonstrated a newly designed super pressure balloon prototype that may enable a new era of high-altitude scientific research. The super-pressure balloon ultimately will carry large scientific experiments to the brink of space for 100 days or more.

This seven-million-cubic-foot super-pressure balloon is the largest single-cell, super-pressure, fully-sealed balloon ever flown. When development ends, NASA will have a 22 million-cubic-foot balloon that can carry a one-ton instrument to an altitude of more than 110,000 feet…

Ultra-long duration missions using the super pressure balloon cost considerably less than a satellite and the scientific instruments flown can be retrieved and launched again, making them ideal very-high altitude research platforms.

You can track the balloons online. Which is a real gas. Har!