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TOPIC: Antarctica
Blobrana


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RE: Antarctica
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Intensive Study Of New Zealand Seafloor To Start This Week
A German research ship with a multi-national crew of scientists sets off from Wellington this week for a three-month study of New Zealand’s ocean floor.
A focus of the project is to learn more about gas hydrates - deposits of frozen methane beneath the sea floor off the North Island’s east coast between Cook Strait and East Cape.
Gas hydrates occur worldwide, but the international marine science community regards those off the New Zealand coast as attractive to study because they are accessible, they are actively seeping methane into the ocean, they occur at a variety of depths, and they vary between stable and unstable depending of ocean current temperatures.
This makes the area known as the Hikurangi Margin, off the North Island’s east coast, a unique study area.
Gas hydrates are seen as a possible future energy source. The other reason they are significant is that when they decompose naturally, they release large amounts of methane into the ocean.
Scientists on the voyage will use a wide range of equipment and techniques to determine the physical extent of gas hydrates under the seafloor, and the processes that cause their decomposition.
The research will take place from the 98m-long Sonne (German for ‘sun’), a well equipped research ship capable of deploying a variety of video-guided sediment sampling devices and deepsea robots for studying the ocean floor.
The voyage, led by the German research institute IFM-GEOMAR from Kiel, involves 27 scientists from 11 research organisations – five from New Zealand, five from Europe, and one from Australia. The Sonne is scheduled to put to sea on Friday morning.

Source GNS Science

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Blobrana


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Mt Vinson
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An Australian team of climbers on Tuesday successfully reached the summit of Antarctica's tallest mountain.
The four-people team is the first in the world to climb from sea level to the summit of 4,900-meter Mount Vinson.
Other climbers, including Australians, have reached the summit of Mt Vinson, but never after a trek from sea level.
It took the team leader Duncan Chessell, a mountaineer from Adelaide, capital of the state of South Australia, and other three mountaineers three weeks to complete the trek, according to Australian Broadcasting Corporation radio.
They reached the summit after completing their 400-kilometer trek across the continent.

Source Xinhua

Vinson Massif is the highest mountain of Antarctica, located about 1,200 km from the South Pole. The mountain is about 21 km long and 13 km. The southern end of the massif is capped by Mount Craddock (4,650 m).

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Blobrana


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Antarctic deep
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The mysteries of the Antarctic deep will be probed by a new vessel capable of plunging 6.5km (four miles) down.
Isis, the UK's first deep-diving remotely operated vehicle (ROV), will be combing the sea-bed in the region in its inaugural science mission.
Researchers hope to uncover more about the effects of glaciers on the ocean floor, and also find out about the animals that inhabit these waters.
The mission begins in mid-January and will last for about three weeks.

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Blobrana


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US scientists have reconstructed a 40,000-year record of wind conditions at the South Pole.
They assembled the climate data by measuring the distribution of dust layers seen in two ice boreholes.
A comparison of the layers allowed the University of California-Berkeley team to gauge how rough snow surfaces would have been in ancient times.
The researchers then used this "proxy" to assess the probable strength of wind needed to produce those features.
The technique needs refinement and works best in the deeper parts of the ice. Nonetheless, scientists are confident it gives at least a broad record of conditions at the pole some 30,000 to 70,000 years ago.

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Blobrana


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Mount Erebus
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“George Steinmetz was drawn to Mount Erebus, in Antarctica, by the ice. The volcano constantly sputters hot gas and lava, sculpting surreal caves and towers that the photographer had read about and was eager to see. And though he'd heard that reaching the 12,500-foot summit would be an ordeal, he wasn't prepared for the scorching lava bombs that Erebus hurled at him.”

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Blobrana


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Amery Ice Shelf
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Hobart scientists are heading to Antarctica to study the cause of enormous cracks forming in the Amery Ice Shelf.
The cracks began forming around a decade ago and are growing at three to five metres a day.
The fractures threatened to break off a 900-square-kilometre piece of the Amery Ice Shelf, which is about the size of Tasmania.
Scientists want to know what is causing these cracks, as the last recorded activity in this part of eastern Antarctica was in the 1960s.
The head of the research, Professor Richard Coleman, says there is not enough evidence to blame global warming.

"It may be in a 50- to 60-year cycle but we would need more data to say whether it's increasing in terms of carving events due to warming of the ice shelf" - Professor Richard Coleman.

Professor Coleman says with the ice already floating, it will not increase ocean levels.

Source

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Blobrana


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Sediments extracted from the Antarctic seafloor show the world's largest ice shelf has disintegrated and reappeared many times in the past.
Fluctuations in the Ross Ice Shelf are revealed by an early look at cores drilled from the seabed underneath the giant ice slab.
The investigation is being carried out by scientists drilling near the US and New Zealand bases on Ross Island.

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Blobrana


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Meteorite hunters have found a rock in Antarctica that they’ve traced to the moon – but an area of the moon that is virtually a geological terra incognita, or should that be luna incognita? Experts say there’s only one other sample like it in the world.

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-- Edited by Blobrana at 02:32, 2006-09-14

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Blobrana


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Lunar meteorite
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On Dec. 11 Members of the Antarctic Search for Meteorites program, based at Case Western Reserve University found a golf ball-sized lunar meteorite on the Miller Range, Antarctica.
The space rock was possibly blasted off the lunar surface by an asteroid impact soon after the moon's formation 4.5 billion years ago.
The sample, whose discovery was announced Tuesday, is exceedingly rare, one of less than 50 lunar meteorites found on Earth, and only the second of its geologic type. Further analysis of the innocuous tan rock known as MIL 05035 may shed light on the moon's violent early history.

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Blobrana


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RE: Antarctica
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Despite recent indications that Antarctica cooled considerably during the 1990s, new research suggests that the world's iciest continent has been getting gradually warmer for the last 150 years, a trend not identifiable in the short meteorological records and masked at the end of the 20th century by large temperature variations.

Numerous ice cores collected from five areas allowed scientists to reconstruct a temperature record that shows average Antarctic temperatures have risen about two-tenths of a degree Celsius, or about one-third of a degree Fahrenheit, in 150 years. That might not sound like much, but the overall increase includes a recorded temperature decline of nearly 1 degree in the 1990s, said David Schneider, a University of Washington postdoctoral researcher in Earth and space sciences.

"Even if you account for the cooling in the '90s, we still see that two-tenths of a degree increase from the middle of the 1800s to the end of the 20th century" - David Schneider, the lead author of a paper detailing the work published Aug. 30 in Geophysical Research Letters.

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