Nov
05
2019
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SALSA Part I: Scratching the Surface
A team of researchers and drilling engineers recently spent six weeks in West Antarctica carefully drilling through nearly a mile of ice to study Mercer Subglacial Lake. This body of water is buried under an ice stream, and likely hasn't seen the light of day for at least thousands and possibly hundreds of thousands, of years.
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Sep
04
2019
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Plasma Patch Atlas
High above the surface of the Earth, flow giant, invisible clouds of charged gas that can degrade radio transmissions, disrupt GPS Signals and play havoc with other communications and navigation systems. But they're not always showing up when scientists predicted. This year geophysicist Alex Chartier traveled across Antarctica to figure out what's going on in Earth's upper atmosphere.
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Jul
23
2019
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The Flight of X-Calibur
Antarctica can be a double-edged sword for astronomers: conditions there are some of the best in the world for observing the heavens, but the harshness of the place can be hard on equipment. In December 2018, astronomers who launched the x-ray telescope "X-Calibur" to study neutron stars and black holes got a taste of that contrast.
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Jul
08
2019
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Listening to Rock Music
Rocks are cracking up all over Antarctica's McMurdo Dry Valleys. Though it may take hundreds of thousands, or even millions of years, the slow but inevitable processes of weathering eventually reduce all rocks into sand or even clay.
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Jun
17
2019
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Digging For Fishies
The mountains of Antarctica may seem an unlikely place to find fish, but they were exactly what a team of paleontologists working along the edge of the Polar Plateau last winter were looking for. In a region now defined by dry rocky terrain poking up through vast sheets of thick ice, the five-member team spent much of December and January scouring the exposed landscape for the remains of ancient fish.
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May
07
2019
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Icefin Tests the Waters
Navigating a robot through the frozen ocean's frigid waters was all in a day's work for the RISE UP science team. From their makeshift mission control in a small fish hut, the researchers maneuvered their underwater vehicle through the seawater below.
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Apr
22
2019
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The Dry Valleys' Briny Deep
Hunting for groundwater has come a long way from divining rods in the days of yore. This past austral summer, scientists in Antarctica used a sophisticated and highly sensitive instrument to look for water in one of the continent's driest regions.
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Mar
18
2019
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The First Wave of the "Thwaites Invasion"
The U.S. and U.K.-funded International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration (ITGC) officially kicked off its science field research in January, when four researchers and their support teams set foot on a remote, fast-melting glacier in West Antarctica, establishing a beachhead for an unprecedented international project to determine the glacier's fate.
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Feb
05
2019
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Penguins From SPAAAAAACCCE
Scientists want to know how many emperor penguins there are in the world, and they're using Earth-observing satellites to count them.
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Jan
07
2019
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Stressed Out Fish?
Climate change is expected to be stressful on fish species worldwide: as the climate warms, so too will the oceans, putting a strain on creatures that depend on consistent water temperatures.
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Dec
21
2018
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50 Years Of Weddell Seals
For a half a century, generations of researchers have studied various aspects of the life cycle of generations of Weddell seals around Antarctica's McMurdo Sound, making them some of the most closely studied mammals on the planet.
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Nov
20
2018
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New Ocean Floats Deepen a Carbon-Cycle Mystery
A new network of automated instruments throughout the Southern Ocean, which surrounds Antarctica, is dramatically changing how scientists view the planet's least understood ocean.
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Oct
17
2018
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Researchers Release the Highest Resolution Antarctic Map Ever Produced
Researchers at the National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded Polar Geospatial Center in September released the biggest and most detailed map of Antarctica ever produced.
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Hunting For the Oldest Ice
Larvae La Vida Loca
