1 December, 2020 by Teal Riley
The Permian–Triassic is a critical period for interpreting and understanding the development of West Antarctica and its correlations into Patagonia, South America. The Antarctic Peninsula preserves isolated outcrops of Permian–Triassic…
1 December, 2020 by Ingrid Cnossen
Monitoring climatic changes in the thermosphere and ionosphere and understanding their causes is important for practical purposes. To support this effort and facilitate comparisons between observations and model results, a…
1 December, 2020 by Kevin Hughes, Peter Convey
To date, Antarctica is the only continent to have escaped the COVID-19 pandemic. This was facilitated by the continent's isolation and low human presence, combined with the global emergence of…Read more on Implications of the COVID-19 pandemic for Antarctica
1 December, 2020 by Scott Hosking
If financial markets are to realign towards truly sustainable development the financial sector needs to differentiate commercial actors more accurately on their climate and environmental performance. A potential breakthrough to…Read more on Spatial finance: Challenges and opportunities in a changing world
1 December, 2020 by Keith Nicholls
In this letter, a novel high-frequency to very-high-frequency wire-mesh dipole antenna design for use in polar regions is discussed and evaluated. The antenna was designed to be lightweight, readily demountable,…Read more on HF Wire-Mesh Dipole Antennas for Broadband Ice-Penetrating Radar.
1 December, 2020 by Peter Convey
The Diego Ramírez and Cape Horn archipelagos are located at the southern end of the Magellanic subantarctic ecoregion. The fauna of insects and other terrestrial invertebrates has been poorly characterized.…1 December, 2020 by Peter Convey
The Yendegaia National Park, located to the south of Tierra del Fuego and at the eastern margin of the Darwin Mountain Range, forms part of the Cape Horn Biosphere Reserve…
30 November, 2020 by Melody Clark
Marine hard-bottom communities are undergoing severe change under the influence of multiple drivers, notably climate change, extraction of natural resources, pollution and eutrophication, habitat degradation, and invasive species. Monitoring marine…
28 November, 2020 by Tracy Moffat-Griffin
Atmospheric gravity waves (GWs) are key drivers of the atmospheric circulation, but their representation in general circulation models (GCMs) is challenging, leading to significant biases in middle atmospheric circulations. Unresolved…
27 November, 2020 by Clara Manno, Eugene Murphy, Geraint Tarling, Gabriele Stowasser, Sally Thorpe, Sophie Fielding
Antarctic krill play an important role in biogeochemical cycles and can potentially generate high-particulate organic carbon (POC) fluxes to the deep ocean. They also have an unusual trait of moulting…
27 November, 2020 by Peter Convey
Springtails and mites are the dominant groups of terrestrial arthropods in Antarctic terrestrial ecosystems. Their Antarctic diversity includes a limited number of species, which are frequently endemic to specific regions…26 November, 2020 by Gaelle Veyssiere, Jeremy Wilkinson
When the air is very cold, water at the surface of the ocean freezes, forming sea ice. Parts of the Arctic Ocean are covered by sea ice during the entire…25 November, 2020 by Andrew Fleming, Jeremy Wilkinson
To successfully operate in a harsh environment like the Arctic Ocean, one must be able to understand and predict how that environment will evolve over different spatial and temporal scales.…Read more on Improving Situational Awareness in the Arctic Ocean
24 November, 2020 by Amelie Kirchgaessner, John King, Jenny Turton
Warm, dry föhn winds are observed over the Larsen C Ice Shelf year-round and are thought to contribute to the continuing weakening and collapse of ice shelves on the eastern…20 November, 2020 by Martin Collins
Planktonic stages of benthic octopuses can reach relatively large sizes in some species, usually in oceanic, epipelagic waters while living as part of the macroplankton. These young octopuses appear to…Read more on Extended pelagic life in a bathybenthic octopus
19 November, 2020 by Andrew Wood, Jennifer Jackson, Martin Collins
Blue whales Balaenoptera musculus at South Georgia were heavily exploited during 20th century industrial whaling, to the point of local near-extirpation. Although legal whaling for blue whales ceased in the…Read more on South Georgia blue whales five decades after the end of whaling
18 November, 2020
The wintertime atmospheric circulation in the southern hemisphere is characterised by a zonally asymmetric, spiral-like pattern. This includes a strong jet over the Indian Ocean region, which bifurcates downstream into…Read more on The dynamics of the South Pacific split jet in austral winter
18 November, 2020 by Liz Thomas
Ice cores are an important record of the past surface mass balance (SMB) of ice sheets, with SMB mitigating the ice sheets' sea level impact over the recent decades. For…
17 November, 2020 by Kaitlin Naughten
Understanding changes in Antarctic ice shelf basal melting is a major challenge for predicting future sea level. Currently, warm Circumpolar Deep Water surrounding Antarctica has limited access to the Weddell…Read more on Necessary conditions for warm inflow towards the Filchner Ice Shelf, Weddell Sea
16 November, 2020 by Alex Brisbourne, Andy Smith, Robert Arthern
Hydraulically‐forced crevassing is thought to reduce the stability of ice shelves and ice sheets, affecting structural integrity and providing pathways for surface meltwater to the bed. It can cause ice…Read more on Breaking the ice: Identifying hydraulically-forced crevassing
16 November, 2020 by Fabian Haumann, Paul Holland
Antarctic Bottom Water (AABW) supplies the lower limb of the global overturning circulation, ventilates the abyssal ocean and sequesters heat and carbon on multidecadal to millennial timescales. AABW originates on…16 November, 2020 by Tom Jordan
George VI Sound is a ~600 km long curvilinear channel on the west coast of the southern Antarctic Peninsula separating Alexander Island from Palmer Land. The Sound is a geologically…
15 November, 2020 by Lara Perez Miguel
Cryospheric events in the Arctic Ocean have been largely studied through the imprints of ice sheets, ice shelves and icebergs in the seafloor morphology and sediment stratigraphy. Subglacial morphologies have…12 November, 2020 by Philip Trathan
We analyzed diel vertical migration (DVM) of overwintering Antarctic krill at South Georgia, a region that remains ice-free during the austral winter. We considered DVM in relation to krill body…
10 November, 2020 by Alex Burton-Johnson, Carlos Martin Garcia
Antarctic geothermal heat flow (GHF) affects the temperature of the ice sheet, determining its ability to slide and internally deform, as well as the behaviour of the continental crust. However,…Read more on Geothermal heat flow in Antarctica: Current and future directions
10 November, 2020 by Kayleigh Jones
The behavioural transition from filial dependence to weaning in harbour seal pups is poorly understood. Here we trace progressive changes in pup behaviour with the mother at two pupping sites…8 November, 2020 by Emilie Capron
The biogeochemical cycles encompass the exchange of chemical elements between reservoirs such as the atmosphere, ocean, land and lithosphere. Those exchanges involve biological, geological and chemical processes, hence the term…Read more on Biogeochemical Cycles and Aerosols Over the Last Million Years.
6 November, 2020 by Sally Thorpe
Increasing influence of Atlantic water in the Arctic Ocean has the potential to significantly impact regional water temperature and salinity. Here we use a rDNA barcoding approach to reveal how…Read more on Implications of increasing Atlantic influence for Arctic microbial community structure
6 November, 2020 by Alex Brisbourne, Andy Smith, Thomas Hudson, Thomas Hudson
Improving our understanding of glacial sliding is crucial for constraining basal drag in ice dynamics models. We use icequakes, sudden releases of seismic energy as the ice slides over the…Read more on Icequake source mechanisms for studying glacial sliding
5 November, 2020 by Joseph Marlow
Sponges are a major component of benthic ecosystems across the world and fulfil a number of important functional roles. However, despite their importance, there have been few attempts to compare…Read more on Interocean patterns in shallow water sponge assemblage structure and function
5 November, 2020 by Connor Bamford, Gabriele Stowasser, Jennifer Jackson, Philip Trathan
Around 176500 whales were killed in the sub-Antarctic waters off South Georgia (South Atlantic) between 1904 and 1965. In recent decades, whales have once again become summer visitors, with the…4 November, 2020 by Jennifer Jackson, Philip Trathan, Richard Phillips
The massive number of seabirds (penguins and procellariiformes) and marine mammals (cetaceans and pinnipeds) – referred to here as top predators – is one of the most iconic components of…
3 November, 2020 by Katrin Linse
Plastic pollution in Antarctica and the Southern Ocean has been recorded in scientific literature since the 1980s; however, the presence of microplastic particles (3 November, 2020 by Geraint Tarling
Species of the genus Euphausia dominate the euphausiid biomass of the Southern Ocean, the three largest being Euphausia superba, E. triacantha and E. crystallorophias. We measured a number of morphological…
1 November, 2020 by Philip Trathan
The large-scale spatial patterns and primary drivers of food web dynamics across seascapes can be investigated using isotope ratios in marine consumers. However, interpreting complex signatures from mobile animals can…
1 November, 2020 by Teal Riley
The mid- to Late Triassic marks an episode of magmatism, deformation and metamorphism along the proto-Pacific margin of the Antarctic Peninsula and Patagonia. Calc-alkaline magmatism at ∼227 Ma developed in a…
1 November, 2020 by Peter Convey
Background: The potential waste canola oil-degrading ability of the cold-adapted Antarctic bacterial strain Rhodococcus sp. AQ5-07 was evaluated. Globally, increasing waste from food industries generates serious anthropogenic environmental risks that…1 November, 2020 by Peter Convey
Aim: Effective bioremediation requires optimisation of conditions under which the process takes place. In this study, an Antarctic soil bacterium, Arthrobacter sp. strain AQ5-15, was evaluated for phenol biodegradation under…31 October, 2020 by Andrew Orr, Scott Hosking, Tracy Moffat-Griffin
An important source of polar stratospheric clouds (PSCs), which play a crucial role in controlling polar stratospheric ozone depletion, is the temperature fluctuations induced by mountain waves. These enable stratospheric…30 October, 2020 by Stephen Roberts
Remote Northern Hemisphere (NH) and Southern Hemisphere (SH) lake sediment and peat records of mercury (Hg) deposition have shown a ×3 to ×5 Hg enrichment since pre-industrial times (29 October, 2020 by Mervyn Freeman
In this study we investigate the ability of several different machine learning models to provide probabilistic predictions as to whether interplanetary shocks observed upstream of the Earth at L1 will…
28 October, 2020 by Emma Woodfield, Johnathan Ross, Nigel Meredith, Richard Horne, Sarah Glauert
Electromagnetic Ion Cyclotron (EMIC) waves play an important role in relativistic electron losses in the radiation belts through diffusion via resonant wave‐particle interactions. We present a new approach for calculating…
28 October, 2020 by Fabian Haumann
In cold polar waters, temperatures sometimes drop below the freezing point, a process referred to as supercooling. However, observational challenges in polar regions limit our understanding of the spatial and…
28 October, 2020 by Fausto Ferraccioli
Ice sheet behavior is strongly influenced by the bed topography. However, the effect of the progressive temporal evolution of Antarctica’s subglacial landscape on the sensitivity of the Antarctic Ice Sheet…
28 October, 2020 by Andrew Clarke
Tidepools are not uncommon in Antarctica, but there appear to be no data on the physical environment within polar tidepools and only anecdotal information on their biology. Here we report…Read more on An extreme marine environment: a 14-month record of temperature in a polar tidepool
28 October, 2020 by Iain Staniland
The fishery for Antarctic krill is currently managed using a precautionary, ecosystem-based approach to limiting catch, with performance indices from a long-term monitoring program focused on several krill-dependent predators that…27 October, 2020 by James France
We report measurements of methane (CH4) mixing ratios and emission fluxes derived from sampling at a monitoring station at an exploratory shale gas extraction facility in Lancashire, England. Elevated ambient…Read more on Methane flux from flowback operations at a shale gas site.
21 October, 2020 by Louis-Alexandre Couston
We develop and analyse the first second-order phase-field model to combine melting and dissolution in multi-component flows. This provides a simple and accurate way to simulate challenging phase-change problems in…Read more on Improved phase-field models of melting and dissolution in multi-component flows
19 October, 2020 by Anna Belcher, Geraint Tarling
Ocean life helps keep atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide lower by taking carbon out of the atmosphere and transporting it to the deep ocean, through sinking particles. Antarctic krill live…Read more on Why krill swarms are important to the global climate
19 October, 2020 by Jaume Forcada
Replication studies are essential for evaluating the validity of previous research findings. However, it has proven challenging to reproduce the results of ecological and evolutionary studies, partly because of the…
18 October, 2020 by Steve Colwell, Tracy Moffat-Griffin
Satellite observations show that there is a wintertime hotspot of gravity wave activity, located mainly over the ocean, around 60°S in the stratosphere However, the sources of the gravity waves…
17 October, 2020 by Philip Trathan
Though climate change is widely known to negatively affect the distribution and abundance of many species, few studies have focused on species that may benefit. Gentoo Penguin (Pygoscelis papua) populations…
16 October, 2020 by Huw Griffiths, Rowan Whittle
Antarctic sea-floor communities are unique, and more closely resemble those of the Palaeozoic than equivalent contemporary habitats. However, comparatively little is known about the processes that structure these communities or…Read more on Benthic ecosystem cascade effects in Antarctica using Bayesian network inference
15 October, 2020 by Ella Gilbert
Observational data and high resolution (Read more on Atmospheric drivers of surface melting on the Larsen C ice shelf, Antarctic Peninsula
15 October, 2020 by James Smith, Joanne Johnson, Louise Ireland, Stephen Roberts
The Amundsen Sea sector of the Antarctic ice sheet presently dominates the contribution from Antarctica to sea level rise. Several large ice streams that currently drain the sector have experienced…
15 October, 2020 by Geraint Tarling, Philip Trathan, Sally Thorpe, Simeon Hill
Antarctic krill, Euphausia superba, supports a valuable commercial fishery in the Southwest Atlantic, which holds the highest krill densities and is warming rapidly. The krill catch is increasing, is concentrated…13 October, 2020 by Keith Nicholls
A set of collocated, in situ oceanographic and glaciological measurements from Petermann Gletscher Ice Shelf, Greenland, provides insights into the dynamics of under‐ice flow driving basal melting. At a site…
13 October, 2020 by Peter Convey
The flightless beetle Merizodus soledadinus, native to the Falkland Islands and southern South America, was introduced to the sub-Antarctic Kerguelen Islands in the early Twentieth Century. Using available literature data,…
12 October, 2020 by Steve Colwell
The Year of Polar Prediction in the Southern Hemisphere (YOPP-SH) had a Special Observing Period (SOP) that ran from November 16, 2018 to February 15, 2019, a period chosen to…Read more on The Year of Polar Prediction in the Southern Hemisphere (YOPP-SH)
12 October, 2020 by Mark Clilverd
High time resolution (1‐5 s) magnetometer, geomagnetically induced current (GIC), and mains harmonic distortion data from the Halfway Bush substation in Dunedin, New Zealand are analyzed. A recently developed technique…10 October, 2020 by David Barnes
Ecosystems in remote regions tend to be highly specific, having historically evolved over long timescales in relatively constant environmental conditions, with little human influence. Such regions are amongst those most…
8 October, 2020 by Lara Perez Miguel
Rifting of continental lithosphere leading to oceanic basins is a complex process conditioned by different factors such as the rheology and thermal structure of the underlying lithosphere, as well as…7 October, 2020 by Alex Burton-Johnson, Carlos Martin Garcia, Fausto Ferraccioli
Antarctic geothermal heat flow (GHF) affects the ice sheet temperature, determining how it slides and internally deforms, as well as the rheological behaviour of the lithosphere. However, GHF remains poorly…Read more on Antarctic geothermal heat flow: future research directions
7 October, 2020 by Huw Griffiths, Katrin Linse
Climate change is influencing some environmental variables in the Southern Ocean (SO) and this will have an effect on the marine biodiversity. Peracarid crustaceans are one of the dominant and…
2 October, 2020 by David Barnes, Terri Souster, Terri Souster
The flow of carbon from atmosphere to sediment fauna and sediments reduces atmospheric CO2, which in turn reduces warming. Here, during the Changing Arctic Ocean Seafloor programme, we use comparable…Read more on Variation in zoobenthic blue carbon in the Arctic’s Barents Sea Shelf Sediments
1 October, 2020 by Norman Ratcliffe
Remote oceanic islands harbour unique biodiversity, especially of species that rely on the marine trophic resources around their breeding islands. Identifying marine areas used by such species is essential to…
1 October, 2020 by Steve Colwell
A heated snowgauge was installed at Rothera in 2008 and continues to be in operation at the present time. Its measurements have been used to estimate annual snowfall at Rothera,…
1 October, 2020 by Katrin Linse
Lush ‘oases’ of life seen in chemosynthetic ecosystems such as hot vents and cold seeps represent rare, localized exceptions to the generally oligotrophic deep ocean floor. Organic falls, best known…1 October, 2020 by Peter Convey
Bioremediation has been proposed as a means of dealing with oil spills on the continent. However, the introduction of non-native organisms, including microbes, even for this purpose would appear to…
1 October, 2020
Cephalopods represent an important pathway for mercury transfer through food-webs. Due to the general difficulties in capturing oceanic squid, beaks found in the diet of top predators can be used…
1 October, 2020 by Katrin Linse
Geothermal energy provides an important resource in Antarctic marine ecosystems, exemplified by the recent discovery of large-sized chemosymbiotic vesicomyid bivalves (subfamily Pliocardiinae) in the Southern Ocean. These clams, which we…
1 October, 2020 by Clara Manno
Plastic debris has been identified as a potential threat to Antarctic marine ecosystems, however, the impact of nanoplastics (
1 October, 2020 by Caitlin Frankish, Richard Phillips
Determining the drivers of movement of different life‐history stages is crucial for understanding age‐related changes in survival rates and, for marine top predators, the link between fisheries overlap and incidental…
1 October, 2020 by Carlos Martin Garcia
Streaming ice accounts for a major fraction of global ice flux, yet we cannot yet fully explain the dominant controls on its kinematics. In this contribution, we use an anisotropic…
1 October, 2020 by Keith Nicholls
Thermodynamic ablation of ice in contact with the ocean is an essential element of ice sheet and ocean interactions but is challenging to model and quantify. Building on earlier observations…
1 October, 2020
In some animal species, individuals regularly breed with relatives, including siblings and parents. Given the high fitness costs of inbreeding, evolutionary biologists have found it challenging to understand the persistence…Read more on Inbreeding depresses altruism in a cooperative society
1 October, 2020 by Hugh Corr
The authors propose an algorithm to estimate the path followed by refracted signals from a source to a target, through a medium formed by uniform parallel layers with known different…Read more on Efficient path estimation through parallel media for wide-beam ice-sounding radar.
1 October, 2020 by Iain Staniland, Kayleigh Jones, Norman Ratcliffe
Natural selection should favour strategies that maximise reproductive success. Females may use different resources during progressive stages of reproduction according to energetic demands, behavioural constraints and prey availability. We used…1 October, 2020 by Anne-Sophie Bonnet-Lebrun
Pelagic seabirds are important components of many marine ecosystems. The most abundant species are medium/small sized petrels (1 October, 2020 by Alexander Brearley
The physical mechanisms that remove energy from the Southern Ocean’s vigorous mesoscale eddy field are not well understood. One proposed mechanism is direct energy transfer to the internal wave field…Read more on Observed eddy-internal wave interactions in the Southern Ocean
1 October, 2020 by Sofia-Katerina Kufner
We present a local earthquake tomography to illuminate the crustal and uppermost mantle structure beneath the southern Puna plateau and to test the delamination hypothesis. Vp and Vp/Vs ratios were…28 September, 2020 by Louise Sime, Maria Vittoria Guarino
El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is the strongest mode of interannual climate variability in the current climate, influencing ecosystems, agriculture and weather systems across the globe, but future projections of ENSO…Read more on Comparison of past and future simulations of ENSO in CMIP5/PMIP3 and CMIP6/PMIP4 models
28 September, 2020 by Maria Vittoria Guarino
We investigate hydrology during a past climate slightly warmer than the present: the Last Interglacial (LIG). With daily output of pre‐industrial and LIG simulations from eight new climate models we…Read more on Global River Discharge and Floods in the Warmer Climate of the Last Interglacial
24 September, 2020 by Keith Nicholls
Calving events of Petermann Glacier, northwest Greenland, in 2010 and 2012 reduced the length of its ice tongue by c. 25 km, allowing exploration of newly uncovered seafloor during the…
20 September, 2020 by Claus-Dieter Hillenbrand
The marine-based West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) is considered the most unstable part of the Antarctic Ice Sheet, with particular vulnerability in the Amundsen Sea sector where glaciers are melting…
18 September, 2020 by Andrew Fleming, Adrian Jenkins, David Bett, Paul Holland
The Amundsen Sea has the highest thinning rates of ice shelves in Antarctica. This imbalance is caused by changes in ocean melting induced by warm Circumpolar Deep Water (CDW) intrusions.…
16 September, 2020 by Ella Gilbert, John King
Recent ice shelf retreat on the east coast of the Antarctic Peninsula has been principally attributed to atmospherically driven melt. However, previous studies on the largest of these ice shelves…
16 September, 2020 by Chester Sands, David Barnes, Michael Meredith, Simon Morley
The Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC) dominates the open-ocean circulation of the Southern Ocean, and both isolates and connects the Southern Ocean biodiversity. However, the impact on biological processes of other…
16 September, 2020 by Louise Ireland, Richard Phillips
Long-term studies of pelagic nekton in the Southern Ocean and their responses to ongoing environmental change are rare. Using stable isotope ratios measured in squid beaks recovered from diet samples…
15 September, 2020 by Hua Lu
Extreme polar vortex events known as sudden stratospheric warmings can influence surface winter weather conditions, but their timing is difficult to predict. Here, we examine factors that influence their occurrence,…Read more on Forecasting extreme stratospheric polar vortex events
14 September, 2020 by Anna Belcher, Geraint Tarling, Gabriele Stowasser, Ryan Saunders, Sophie Fielding
Mesopelagic fish are an important component of marine ecosystems, and their contribution to marine biogeochemical cycles is becoming increasingly recognized. However, major uncertainties remain in the rates at which they…
9 September, 2020 by Kelly Hogan, Robert Larter, Tom Jordan
Ice shelves play a critical role in the long-term stability of ice sheets through their buttressing effect. The underlying bathymetry and cavity thickness are key inputs for modelling future ice…