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On February 5th, more than twenty years after they first started drilling, Russian scientists finally broke through the last remaining layers of an ice sheet that has separated Lake Vostok from the rest of the world for twenty million years. More »
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Time just flies by, and that was especially true during the first half of November 2009, when the Earth's daily spin around its axis became 0.1 milliseconds shorter. You can blame that lost time on the waters around Antarctica. More »
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13,000 feet beneath the surface of Antarctica's vast ice sheet rests the otherworldly Lake Vostok. Home to some of the most extreme conditions on Earth, Vostok has remained isolated from the rest of the world for 20 million years, and completely inaccessible to mankind. Until now. More »
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Buried over two miles beneath the East Antarctic Ice sheet lurks Lake Vostok — an isolated body of subglacial water, removed from the rest of the world for more than twenty million years. Now, Russian researchers are just a few meters of ice away from entering an environment unlike any we've ever seen... at least, not here on Earth. More »
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Humpback whale songs are absolutely haunting, but here's a marine mammal whose call is even more alien. This is the Weddell seal (Leptonychotes weddellii), an Antarctic pinniped whose vocalizations both underwater and top side resemble ambient techno. These pulses and chirps have territorial and mating functions and will probably give you chills.

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One hundred years before the premiere of Fox's new timey-wimey TV series, one of the most punishing nature expeditions ever undertaken also went by the name of Terra Nova. The ill-fated Antarctic excursion was led by explorer Robert Falcon Scott, who was determined to lead the first successful adventure to the South Pole. More »
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What happens when scientists need supplies, but are hundreds of miles from civilization and surrounded by an 8 foot thick sheet of ice? Billion dollar, specially designed icebreaker ships act as mobile science platforms and make way for supply, personnel, and refueling ships. More »
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Antarctica is the coldest, most desolate place on Earth, and the Southern Ocean that surrounds it is much the same...with one pretty massive exception. The hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor are hot, dark oases, full of previously unknown species. More »
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At first glance, the image up top resembles a vast, gleaming oceanscape with a snow-capped island looming in the distance. But if you look closely (click here for a much better view), you'll see that the rippling surface in the foreground is not liquid water, but ice; and that the three dark figures are actually riding snowmobiles. More »
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Did you catch last week's solar eclipse? Did you even know there was a solar eclipse last week? It's okay if you didn't — turns out it was only visible from high latitudes in the southern hemisphere, so chances are you wouldn't have been able to spot it anyway. More »
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For the first time ever, BBC nature photographers have captured footage of an underwater brine icicle (also known as a "brinicle") slowly expanding underneath the ice of Antarctica's Little Razorback Island. Woe to be a starfish or urchin that encounters this briny deathtrap! More »
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Most climate change predictions have only examined the next hundred years. But now a new, even more long-term model suggests that temperatures could rise as much as ten degrees Celsius by 2300 — creating conditions not seen for 34 million years. More »
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The Gamburtsev Mountains are over 750 miles long and nearly 9,000 feet tall, making them roughly the same size as the Alps. But nobody has ever even seen these mountains, because they're located deep beneath the Antarctic ice sheet. More »
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Antarctica's frigid climate can make hunting for fossils incredibly difficult. So difficult, in fact, that until 1986, no one had recovered so much as a single dinosaur specimen from the continent's icy grip. More »
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There are hundreds of subglacial lakes buried deep beneath the Antarctic ice, each one completely isolated from the rest of the world for hundreds of thousands of years. And now, scientists are preparing to find out just what's down there. More »
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A hole in Earth's protective ozone layer above the Antarctic has become an annual event for the last 25 years, greatly increasing the South Pole's exposure to ultraviolet rays. Now, the same thing is happening above the Arctic Circle. More »
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Ernest Shackleton earned his place in history as the leader of the ill-fated Endurance expedition, when he braved 920 miles of Antarctic waters to save his stranded crew. Now, for just $2500, you can commemorate Shackleton's heroic legacy...in biscuit form. More »
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In 2008, a team of researchers predicted that warming waters in the Southern Ocean would lead to the arrival of king crabs in Antarctic waters within 100 years. Now, just three years later, evidence suggests that the king crab invasion is already well underway. More »
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NASA has released a map charting the movement of massive ice sheets on the continent of Antarctica. By compiling these maps into animations like the one shown above, researchers can, for the very first time, examine how the outward flow of the continent's ice sheets could help us predict future rises in sea level. More »
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The Ice Age can be explained by some well-placed specks of iron. Adding dust to the waters around Antarctica can supercharge plankton growth, causing global temperature drops. To stop climate change, we need a whole lot of iron filings. More »
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It's hard to imagine, but about 55 million years ago, Antarctica was ice-free and full of lush forests. Now analysis of ancient pollen has revealed when the last Antarctic vegetation died out...and what's next for the continents's vast ice sheets. More »
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It's hard to know where to begin when calculating the effects that climate change might have on our planet, but I'm guessing most people haven't considered the smell factor. Global warming could super-charge the production of a particularly smelly gas. More »
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Most composers are happy to write music from the safety of their studios, but not Cheryl Leonard. In 2009, the intrepid composer traveled to the Antarctic Peninsula and spent a month making recordings and gathering objects that she would eventually transform into compositions, instruments, and music videos. More »
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What links a scientific research station in Antarctica with a unique opera performance in Germany's capital? More »
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Antarctica is the only continent on Earth where humans haven't set up permanent homes. It's an icy desert that was once a subtropical forest, teeming with life. But scientists believe that the cold land could bloom again. More »
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Historians brought three bottles of hundred-year-old whiskey back from a cache of supplies left during one of famed explorer Shackleton's expeditions to Antarctica. A whiskey manufacturer vows to open and taste them - for science, of course. More »
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Back in 2003, photographer and astronomer Fred Bruenjes traveled to the depths of Antarctica in search of a total eclipse. For his troubles, he got this absolutely astonishing image of the eclipse ripping a hole in space above Antarctica. More »
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An oxygen-rich lake, unreachable for the past 14 million years and buried beneath a thick sheet of ice, is about to be penetrated by a drill bit from a faraway place. More »
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Robots won't only be going into space in November — they'll also be heading under the ice of Antarctica. More »
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What's the epitome of beverage decadence? Drinking the ice cores from pristine ancient ice. These cores can have a vintage of 100,000 years, and if you're a glacial scientist, you may be lucky enough to chug one. More »
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Why are two groups of tiny sea creatures called bryozoans nearly identical, despite being separated by 1,500 miles of ice? They must have traveled across the continent long ago - on a massive Antarctic seaway. More »
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A group of polar scientists were testing out a new method of drilling through layers of ice in the antarctic. When they dropped a camera deep into the dark waters, they were flabbergasted to discover this tiny orange crustacean. More »
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It's a once in a decade occurrence: a bounty of meat falls to Antarctica's ocean floor, prompting it voracious inhabitants to descend in a frenzy of flesh-skewering sea worms, pulsating sea stars, and giant underwater spiders. More »
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Photos of the Aurora Borealis, the Northern Lights, have become a common enough sight, but a less frequently seen phenomenon is their Southern cousin, the Aurora Australis, which create a spectacular light show over the Antarctic desert. More »
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Today scientists announced they had discovered mountains and valleys buried deep beneath antarctic ice, which is now rapidly melting away (pictured). The land revealed has remained untouched for 14,000,000 years. You know what that means. More »
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Humans may have conquered Everest and K2, but one set of mountains has continued to elude explorers: Antarctica’s Gamburtsevs, the setting for H.P. Lovecraft's famous tale "At the Mountains of Madness." Buried beneath four kilometers of ice, the mountain range has never been seen by human eyes, and its position near the center of the frozen continent has remained a mystery to geologists. Now an international team of researchers will burrow into the ice and finally get a first-hand look at the subglacial peaks. More »
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The European Space Agency reported on Friday that satellite photos taken over the past several months reveal that the massive Wilkins ice shelf is crumbling, even in the depths of antarctic winter. The scary part is that the bit that's crumbling, as you can see in these images, is a small bridge attaching a massive, thousands-of-square-miles sheet of ice to another. Once this tiny bridge falls apart, it will unleash one of the biggest chunks of ice to break off the frozen continent ever. The ESA estmates the bridge will break up within the next few days. [ESA via Universe Today] More »
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They may look like space stations floating in vacuum, but these are actually delicate ice bubbles that formed in Ontario's Cranberry Lake. Michael Runtz took this picture of the segmented shapes created when pockets of air slowly bubble up from the bottom of the lake and get trapped in the freezing water as they move. Want to see what happens when giant ice structures are sculpted by wind? More »
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Is an invisible, undetectable force tearing the universe apart? The South Pole Telescope is scanning the skies for signs of dark energy to help pinpoint the cause of cosmic expansion. The answers it provides could allow us to better explain the origin of the universe and its ultimate fate. More »
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An enormous chunk of the Wilkins Ice Shelf in Antarctica started collapsing a few weeks ago. The slab, roughly the size of Connecticut, is "hanging by a thread." What will happen when over 5,000 square miles of ice break free? It could be a part of the coming ecological apocalypse. But if we just use the right technology, that iceberg could mean drinkable water for people in the parched regions of the Western U.S. and Australia where climate change is already creating terrible droughts. More »
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