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POPSAntarctica is breaking up, in a troubling sign of global warming
'The latest images, taken by Envisat's radar, say fractures have now opened up in this bridge and adjacent areas of the plate are disintegrating, creating large icebergs. The Antarctic peninsula -- the tongue of land that juts northward from the white continent towards South America -- has had one of the highest rates of warming anywhere in the world in recent decades. But this latest stage of the breakup occurred during the Southern Hemisphere's winter, when atmospheric temperatures are at their lowest. One idea is that warmer water from the Southern Ocean is reaching the underside of the ice shelf and thinning it rapidly from underneath. "Wilkins Ice Shelf is the most recent in a long, and growing, list of ice shelves on the Antarctic Peninsula that are responding to the rapid warming that has occurred in this area over the last fifty years," researcher David Vaughan of the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) said. "Current events are showing that we were being too conservati
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POPSIce Shelf Collapses in Antarctica A trend of "extraordinary warming" over the past 50 years in Antarctica has caused the loss of several ice shelves, Matthias Braun of Bonn University, and Angelika Humbert of Münster University, said in a statement. The researchers also warned that the last strip of ice on Wilkins would disappear soon. "The remaining plate has an arched fracture at its narrowest position," they said, "making it very likely that the connection will break completely in the coming days." —Lauren Morse
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POPSEarth From Space: A Blooming North Sea MERIS acquired this image on 7 May 2008, working in Full Resolution mode to provide a spatial resolution of 300 m. Globally, phytoplankton are a major influence on the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, and hence need to be modelled into calculations of future climate change. Just like land-based plants, they accumulate carbon dioxide during photosynthesis and store it in their tissues, making them potentially important carbon sinks. To support ocean carbon cycle research, ESA's GlobColour project has merged 55 terabytes of data from three state-of-the-art instruments aboard different satellites, including MERIS, MODIS aboard NASA's Aqua and SeaWiFS aboard GeoEye's Orbview-2, to produce a 10-year dataset of global ocean colour stretching from 1997 to 2007. The ocean colour datasets are freely available to the public via the GlobColour website.
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POPSFreezy Picture This Envisat image features the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, which lies to the north of mainland Canada and consists of 94 major islands and more than 36,000 minor ones. Victoria Island (visible in centre and lower half of image) sits astride the boundary between the Nunavut (eastern side) and Northwest Territories.
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POPSArctic summer ice anomaly shocks scientists Satellite observations in the past couple of years have also shown that the extent of perennial ice is rapidly declining, but this strange condition in late August marks the first time the perennial ice pack appears to exhibit thinner and more mobile conditions in the European sector of the Central Arctic than in earlier years.
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