"This is video of an aurora australis taken at the geographic south pole! I'm not absolutely sure, but it might actually be the first true video of an aurora australis here, as opposed to a timelapse of longer exposures. Sorry about the swearing - if you were there seeing it you'd probably swear too."
posted by showbiz_liz
on May 2, 2013 -
15 comments
Sir Ranulph Twistleton-Wickham-Fiennes is 68 years old, a cancer survivor, and he's preparing to tackle a six month 2,000 mile trek
across Antarctica at night. Partially to raise money for charity, but mostly because if he doesn't accomplish it, someone else might manage it instead.
posted by BZArcher
on Dec 28, 2012 -
18 comments
The team of scientists and young researchers at POLENET, stationed at Byrd camp on the west Antarctic ice sheet, have been video podcasting since October 2009. Their
seventh features kickin' music by the Weepies. SLYT:
Antarctica (song)
posted by friendlymilkman
on Jan 2, 2011 -
2 comments
How we lost the cure for scurvy. "Now, I had been taught in school that scurvy had been conquered in 1747...but here was a Royal Navy surgeon in 1911 apparently ignorant of what caused the disease, or how to cure it. Somehow a highly-trained group of scientists at the start of the 20th century knew less about scurvy than the average sea captain in Napoleonic times."
posted by rodgerd
on Mar 8, 2010 -
90 comments
Early in the days of
exploration of Antarctica, Australian geologist
Douglas Mawson turned down an invitation to join Robert Falcon Scott's
Terra Nova Expedition in 1910 (
Cool Antarctica previously). Instead, Mawson lead his own expedition, the
Australasian Antarctic Expedition (December 1911 to December 1913), an expedition to chart the 2000-mile coastline directly south of Australia, one of the least-visited parts of the continent throughout the early years of Antarctic exploration.
The group's efforts and activities are well documented, and many remnants of the expedition remain on Antarctica.
The conservation of Mawson's Huts is now an ongoing effort from
Association of Australasian Palaeontologists (AAP)
Mawson's Huts Foundation. While most efforts were focused on the recovery and treatment of artifacts inside the main hut, the group also searched for the
Vickers (
Aviation)
monoplane that was modified to become an "air tractor", or motorized sledge. The remains of the plane were last seen in 1975.
Now the plane has been found, thanks to an exceptionally low tide and a bit of luck.
[more inside]
posted by filthy light thief
on Jan 5, 2010 -
11 comments
Blood Falls - The iron rich red liquid gushing from a buried Antarctica lake shows how life may have existed on a snowball Earth, or on Europa.
posted by Artw
on Apr 18, 2009 -
52 comments
On Oct. 27th, 1915.
Sir Ernest Shackleton gave the order to abandon ship, moving the crew and supplies off of the
ice bound Endurance. The Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition would never achieve it's goal of crossing the continent, instead Shackleton would become famous for somethings far greater: his masterful and amazing ability at leadership and survival for himself and his crew of 27 men under the harshest conditions imaginable.
[more inside]
posted by mrzarquon
on Oct 27, 2008 -
59 comments
A new campaign plans to relocate polar bears to Antarctica to protect them from the effects of climate change. Based on the rates of ice melt in the North, scientists say most polar bears will be
gone by 2050. The first bears will be
moved on Earth Day, April 22. The relocation will be the initial step in a planned five-year program to migrate 3,000 polar bears from the Northern Arctic to the southern continent of Antarctica. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
plans to rule soon on whether to list polar bears as endangered species; however, it has indicated that relocating polar bears would be much less expensive to taxpayers than listing them under the 1973 act.
posted by commonmedia
on Mar 31, 2008 -
24 comments
After two big Antarctic ice shelves
broke off several years ago, a
world of new species was found underneath.
Pictures and a press release came out yesterday, showing spindly orange starfish among other interesting creatures. Here is some more
information on the expedition.
The fact that the shelves melted when they did is most likely a result of global warming, but having them out of the way gave researchers a golden opportunity to study what lives beneath the ice.
Other occassions where a disaster has simultaneously been a great research opportunity include radioactive fallouts: at Chernobyl the evacuated area has been
monitored for the past decades to see which species move in and how they thrive (
previously on Metafilter)
posted by easternblot
on Feb 26, 2007 -
21 comments
More gloomy news on the whole climate change thing. It seems that Greenland's ice caps are melting three times as fast as previously measured (ultimately, in a thousand years or so, leading to a 6.5m sea level rise). While at the other end of the planet, it's
not snowing as much as we hoped to limit sea level rises. But hey, we can still
laugh about it, right?
posted by wilful
on Aug 10, 2006 -
29 comments
The last hope of life on earth: Svalbard. Most of humanity
depends on just 12 plant species, down from over 7,000 historically. Fortunately, seeds can be viable for
up to thousands of years, and seed banks have already preserved many species, including the
entire plant population of Antarctica. But with
seed banks being destroyed as the result of wars and accident, Norway has
has begun work on an underground facility, protected by polar bears, in the
Arctic permafrost that is designed to hold millions of seeds, as
"final safety net" for humanity.
posted by blahblahblah
on Jun 19, 2006 -
36 comments
