Everyone knows that the bulk of an iceberg is underwater, so what happens when they hit the sea floor? Icebergs that scrape over the sea floor or get stuck on underwater elevations cause enormous disturbance events. Entire faunal assemblages are wiped out during such events. Scraping icebergs leave behind a diverse landscape, usually marked by “bulldozed” areas as well as ploughed sediments or piles of rock. This new, unoccupied habitat is quickly seized by mobile pioneer species. Often, patchworks of different recolonization stages form and thus enhance species diversity. Initially, scientists assumed that the seafloor fauna of the Larsen A and B area would have been strongly affected by iceberg scouring. When an ice shelf collapses, many smaller icebergs form in a shor...

Imagine a giant meat locker. Now imagine three of them in a row. That's where several kilometers of ice from the deep drilling projects at Vostok and Dome C of the European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica are stored outside of Grenoble, France. For my thesis work, I'm using these ice core records to reconstruct past climate conditions going back to 800,000 years ago. Unfortunately, by the time I started my thesis, these deep drilling projects were completed or nearly, so I didn't get a chance to make it out onto the ice. That's where the meat lockers come in. Several times a year I get to suit up and make my way past pallets of meat and cheese (this is France...

Under the former Larsen ice shelf east of the Antarctic Peninsula, deep-sea sea cucumbers and stalked feather stars were ubiquitously found in shallow waters. These animals usually inhabit far greater water depths. The main aim of the current Polarstern expedition to Antarctica is the investigation of marine ecosystems under the former Larsen ice shelf. This "white spot" with regard to biodiversity research gave rise to the following questions: What kind of life actually existed under the former floating ice shelf which was up to several hundred meters thick? What are the prospects for the future after the collapse of the ice shelf? Obviously, prosperous life did not exist in the area where the Larsen B ice shelf broke off three years ago. This is surprisin...

You can track the Polarstern research vessel in a number of ways as it traverses Antarctic waters. You can view the raw coordinate data here on www.sailwx.info's tracking map. You can also track it in Google Earth by downloading this constantly updated file from the SCAR MarBIN portal. The file in turn accesses position data from this page on the Polar View website, which al...

ATTENTION: News, Education Editors CONTACT: Tom Simons, University Communications, (402) 472-8514 This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ) Lincoln, Neb., Dec. 19, 2006 -- The Antarctic Geological Drilling (ANDRILL) Program drilled to a new record depth of 1,000 meters below the seafloor from the site on the Ross Ice Shelf near Scott Base in Antarctica Dec. 16. The depth made ANDRILL the most successful Antarctic drilling program in terms of depth and rock core recovered, breaking the previous record of 999.1 meters set in 2000 by the Ocean Drilling Program's drill ship, the Joides Resolution. The operations team of 25 drillers, engineers and support staff are justifiably thrilled, ANDRILL Project Manager Jim Cowie said. Antarctica New Ze...

Because they are so many birds and so few observers around Antarctica, every observation matters. The recently launched marine biodiversity internet portal SCAR-MarBIN allows birdwatchers to directly upload their data, making them available to scientists as well as the general public. As top predators, birds are an important component of the Southern Ocean‘s ecosystem. They are part of the comprehensive effort of the Census of Antarctic Marine Life (CAML) to study the distribution and abundance of the Antarctic biodiversity. CAML is now using the SCAR MarBIN portal, developed at the Royal Belgian Institute for Natural Sciences by Claude De Broyer and Bruno Danis, to concentrate biogeographical data on bi...

HMS Endurance is an ice breaker in the service of the British Royal Navy. Every northern autumn she heads to Antarctica to support British Antarctic bases and projects. The ship has a website dedicated to it, Visit and Learn, which tracks its travels and posts updates on its doings. Now you can also track HMS Endurance in Google Earth. An enterprising coder has used the publicly available data on the website to create a constantly updated file pinpointing the ship's current and past locations on Google's popular virtual globe. Here's how to follow along with the HMS Endurance using Google Earth: If you haven't already done so, ...

Thousands of amphipods can reduce fish carcasses to bones, but these carrion experts are unexpectedly scarce in the area of the recently collapsed Larsen B ice shelf, where the Polarstern Expedition is currently conducting research Baited traps consistently used to provide good numbers of amphipods throughout the expedition, whether designed to catch them or targeting fish. “Traps are secured on a metal frame, equipped with a weight and buoys designed to cope with the high pressure at the sea floor, and then dropped to the bottom. After 48 hours, the vessel returns, triggering the traps' release from the weights via an acoustic signal sent from a transmitter. Within 15 to 30 minutes, depending on the water depth, the traps float to the surface and are recovered,” explai...

If you're a lover of the novels of Magnus Mills, then you may have read his Explorers of the New Century, in which two rival expeditions traverse distinctly polar terrain. The expeditions are vying to be the first to arrive at the "Agreed Furthest Point" (AFP), the point furthest from civilization. Imagine my surprise to find out that there actually is such a point in real life, called the Southern Pole of Inaccessibility — it's the point on the Anta...

Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROVs) remain an efficient technology to uncover the secrets of Antarctic sea floor fauna. A video sequence at the foot of the Larsen B ice-shelf remnant reveals deep-sea sea cucumbers as abundant inhabitants. ROVs have become standard non-invasive imaging tools for the Alfred Wegener Institute’s biological expeditions. For our expedition, devoted to the study of continental shelf sea floor communities (which were once under the now collapsed Larsen B ice-shelf), the ROV model Cherokee was selected (shown in the photo). “Inspection ROVs like the Cherokee are fast to deploy and easy to recover” explains the marine ecologist Julian Gutt, who has 15 years ROV experience in Antarctic sea floor fauna investigation. Already used on a...