The Last Core
A different sort of countdown was under way on New Year's Eve at a remote field camp in West Antarctica. In this case, the count literally went down to near the bottom of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, where drillers extracted about 72 more meters of ice cores in five days, reaching a final depth of 3,405 meters for the multiyear WAIS Divide Ice Core project.
Wired
Lasers aren't just for evil geniuses in spoof movies who want to outfit sharks with the latest in weapon technology. Scientists are using fiber-optic and laser technology to make precise temperature measurements in places as diverse as Lake Tahoe the arid soils in Nevada. Now add Antarctica to the list.
Antarctica's Ground Zero
Bob Bindschadler doesn't want to spend the next few weeks at Pine Island Glacier, one of Antarctica's most inhospitable locations. But it's on glacier's floating ice shelf where he and his colleagues believe they'll learn how the ocean is changing the ice. For the glaciologist from NASA, this is ground zero for research into how Antarctica will contribute to future sea-level rise.
Antarctica on Google
Paul Morin and his mapmakers at the Polar Geospatial Center at the University of Minnesota are doing all they can to ensure the whole world can get a good look at Antarctica by teaming up with Google. The Internet giant is putting high-resolution satellite imagery of the continent into its mapping applications.
