May
24
2017
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Methane Munching Microbes
VIDEO: Five years ago, a plume of natural methane started seeping out of the seafloor near McMurdo Station, providing researchers an unprecedented chance to study the formation and development of colonies of microorganisms that rely on methane for nourishment.
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May
17
2017
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Tag! You're it!
A number of Adelie penguins around the Ross Sea are sporting sophisticated new leg bands this year. Ornithologist David Ainley and his team attached new electronic tags to about 150 penguins to record where each penguin goes and how deeply it dives under water. The tagging project ties in with a broader effort that he's been spearheading for 20 years, monitoring Adelie penguin populations and demographics around Ross Island.
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Apr
26
2017
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Caves Of Gas
Planet Earth is gassy. All over the world, plumes of gasses that formed deep under the planet's surface, pour out of active volcanoes and mix with the atmosphere. Tobias Fischer, a volcanologist at the University of New Mexico, spent two seasons exploring the frozen face of Antarctica's Mount Erebus, the world's southernmost active volcano, to better understand these fumes escaping from the depths of the Earth.
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Apr
20
2017
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Ancient Ice Levels
Today, a massive sheet of ice covers nearly all of West Antarctica, but it hasn't always been that way. Over the past few hundred thousand years, researchers think that the ice sheets have waxed and waned, varying in size as the region's climate changed. To gather evidence of how dynamic the ice cover has been in the past, John Stone of the University of Washington and his team traveled to a remote region of the continent this past season.
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Mar
27
2017
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Seals Don't Waste their Breath
The ubiquitous Weddell seals that live around McMurdo Station are the region's undisputed diving champs, able to hold their breath for 90-plus minutes. That's at least three times as long as any other air-breathing animal in the region. It's an impressive feat, and how they're able to stay under for so long is what Emmanuel Buys and his team have been investigating over the past two seasons in Antarctica.
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Mar
14
2017
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Tracking Earth's Past Magnetic Moments
The key to understanding Earth's prehistoric magnetic field lies hidden in the rocks. Specifically, igneous rocks, basalts that cooled from liquid magma spewed out of volcanos. Geologist Lisa Tauxe of the University of California, San Diego, and her team, traveled to Antarctica to collect rock samples that can tell them more about the planet's magnetic field over the past few million years. The research was funded by the National Science Foundation, which manages the U.S. Antarctic Program.
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Jan
04
2017
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The Cosmic Dust Sucker
The Earth is constantly showered with micrometeorites, every minute of every day. These interstellar particles are no bigger than a grain of sand, but are falling out of the sky everywhere. Collecting this cosmic dust, and separating it from terrestrial contamination, has led scientists to the most remote corner of the planet.
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Dec
14
2016
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Glue Genes
At the mouth of the McMurdo Dry Valleys, along a small spit of land called New Harbor, a team of scientists and divers have worked for decades to unlock the genetic secrets of foraminifera, some of the world's largest single-celled organisms.
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Nov
30
2016
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The Polar Geospatial Center
The icy surface of Antarctica is a dynamic environment; and conditions can change drastically from year to year or even week to week. Because of these endless changes, making a map of the ever-changing ice cover can be like putting together a map of the clouds. The Polar Geospatial Center has been using satellite data to provide invaluable, up-to-date information about surface conditions across the continent for nearly a decade.
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Oct
05
2016
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GRIPS' Moment Under the Sun
As a giant helium balloon lifted the alabaster solar telescope GRIPS (Gamma-Ray Imager/Polarimeter for Solar Flares) aloft, the excitement on the ground was palpable. The team of researchers, who had spent seven years working on the project, jumped for joy and snapped photos of their experiment in the air for the first time.
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Sep
27
2016
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Capturing a Collapse
Not much remains of the Larsen B Ice Shelf, but what is left can teach scientists a lot about how mighty masses of ice fall apart, especially when its last lingering sliver finally crumbles. Researchers traveled to the Scar Inlet along the Antarctic Peninsula to study the remnants of the former ice shelf in February to better understand the peril that glaciers around Antarctica are facing.
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Aug
01
2016
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Searching for Inflation
Scientists working at the South Pole are trying to detect the imprints of gravitational waves from when the universe was only a tiny fraction (about one trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth) of a second old. But first, they have to finish clearing away the galactic dust obscuring their view.
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Jul
11
2016
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A Robotic Rehearsal for Interplanetary Exploration
It is no small undertaking to design and build a 25-foot-long underwater robot, launch it through a narrow hole drilled through 20 feet of sea ice, allow it to maneuver autonomously through several kilometers of Antarctic Ocean for hours at a time and program it to pilot itself back to within a few feet of where it started. The simple part is that it at least takes place on planet Earth.
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The Prehistoric Forests of the Frozen Continent
Dating The East Antarctic Ice Sheet
