The Antarctic Sun: News about Antarctica - Current Science Headlines

Science—Ice and Snow

The National Snow and Ice Data Center scanned close to 40,000 images from Nimbus 1 satellite data to produce the earliest satellite images of Arctic, left, and Antarctic sea ice extent in the 1960s.

Rolling Back the Clock

The National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo., is rolling back the clock on the satellite record for tracking sea ice in the polar regions. NSIDC is releasing new sea ice data from the 1960s after scanning nearly 40,000 images and stitching them together to create composite images.

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Bergy Bits
A NASA satellite recently spied a remnant piece of the mighty B-15 iceberg 13 years after it first calved off the Ross Ice Shelf. B-15T was spotted floating along the Amery Ice Shelf nearly halfway around the continent from where it started.

Iced Over
The first couple of months of 2013 brought some unusual ice behavior in the Weddell Sea, east of the Antarctic Peninsula, as sea ice pushed northward toward warmer latitudes. The ice edge was roughly 200 to 300 kilometers north of what is normal for that time of year.

Spicing It Up
Glaciologists plan to SPICE things up at the South Pole. The South Pole Ice Core (SPICE) project aims to retrieve an ice core 1,500 meters long beginning in the 2014-15 austral summer field season to reconstruct past climate to predict future changes.

In the Pits
Snow retrieved from a pit dug at the South Pole is helping scientists reconstruct past climactic cycles. Particles from the upper atmosphere trapped in a deep pile of Antarctic snow hold clear chemical traces of global meteorological events.

Rolling Back the Clock

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