#antarctia

[nervousqueennightmare]

Benedict Cumberbatch narrates this video~Antarctica and all I heard it PENGUINS and ANTARCTICA 2021

[world-of-mummies]

Melting Ice Reveals Mummified Penguins in Antarctica

Birds that appeared “freshly dead” near an Italian research base turned out to be centuries old.

[earthstory]

Strange ice patterns off the Antarctic Peninsula The VIIRS instrument aboard NASA's Suomi satellite spotted this odd tendril of ice being carried from the main marine ice pack away by a current through the Weddell Sea. Seen as the thick white line between the layers of cloud above and below and the ice pack to the left this phenomenon has puzzled scientists as the ice starts to thicken again as the southern hemisphere enters autumn. The swirls in the tendril are similar to Von Karman vortices (see https://bit.ly/2vrXAD8) that form in the less of islands because they divert the wind around them. Loz Image credit: NASA https://go.nasa.gov/2qG6jvU

[earthstory]

dodoshenka Overnight outside in Antarctic peninsula in sleeping bag 😀 

[earthstory]

View this post on Instagram

on Thursday night I boarded an @airnz 767 from Dunedin, New Zealand to travel down towards the Antarctic Circle to view the Aurora Australis. This was the first commercial flight to view the Aurora out of New Zealand, and I have to tell you it was an amazing experience! A huge thanks has to go to Ian Griffin @portobellopictures for coming up with this idea in the first place and then going through with it and making it a reality. I also gave an in-flight astrophotography workshop, which I believe hasn't been done before, and then it was time to sit back and enjoy the aurora out the window.

The time-lapse from inside the cabin was certainly the first motion controlled time-lapse I've shot on a plane using a @SYRP_ Genie Mini, and then I managed to shoot a 2 hour time-lapse of the aurora through the window. The footage is a like more shakey than I had hoped for, but it's not an easy feat getting stable shots from a tripod in an airplane, but I am just really stoked to have had this incredible experience!

[cgandrews3]

Plastics and PCBs: Ocean Pollutants Causing Big Problems

Eight million tons of plastic end up in our oceans annually. But that isn't our only ocean woe: PCBs could kill half of the world's orcas in 50 years.

[earthstory]

Antarctic Meltwater and Ocean Interaction

As ice, water, and air interact at the edges of outlet glaciers and ice shelves in Western Antarctica, it provides implications to predict the future climate. However, due to the influence of strong ice-climate feedbacks, predicting the Antarctic ice sheets contribution to future sea level rise is a challenge. The only way around this problem is to disentangle these ‘feedbacks’ to minimize uncertainty in predicting how the oceans might change in the future.

As ice melts along the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, fresh water flowing off the ice sheet plays a key role in reducing the salinity and the density of the ocean’s surface water. This makes the layers of ocean more distinct with lower-density water sitting on top. On the bottom is a layer of dense cool water known as the Antarctic Bottom Water. There is not much of mixing in the areas close to the ice margins. Furthermore, models show that the generation of the dense-cold Antarctic Bottom Water has decreased by 25%-50% and the waters at depths from 400 to 700 meters are subject to rapid warming in the next 200 years.

This scenario implies that there will be a critical decrease in the salinity and increase in the temperature around the edges of the ice sheet. Models also show that areas such as the Amundsen Sea in West Antarctica are more vulnerable to an influx in freshwater. The Amundsen Sea is an area of rapid contemporary change in the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. Although impact of this phenomenon is greatest in the Southern Ocean, these effects extend across the Southern Hemisphere.

Nate

Image Credit: Michelle Maria, Pixabay http://bit.ly/1Kp8RWd

Source: http://bit.ly/1o4K1Rz http://bit.ly/1JXcC5u