I thought I was the first Portuguese to study Wandering albatrosses but I was five hundred years too late. When fifteenth-century Portuguese sailors first ventured down the coast of Africa, they encountered large black and white birds with stout bodies, which they called alcatraz, the Portuguese word for large seabirds; English sailors later corrupted alcatraz to albatross. I was studying aspects of their diet and feeding behaviour in ways that could not be done five hundred years ago, information which may help save them from extinction. That made me feel better... Read more here This is an essay...

By Jonathan Amos Science reporter, BBC News, San Francisco US scientists have reconstructed a 40,000-year record of wind conditions at the South Pole. They assembled the climate data by measuring the distribution of dust layers seen in two ice boreholes. A comparison of the layers allowed the University of California-Berkeley team to gauge how rough snow surfaces would have been in ancient times. The researchers then used this "proxy" to assess the probable strength of wind needed to produce those features. The technique needs refinement and works best in the deeper parts of the ice. Nonetheless, scientists are confident it gives at least a broad record of conditions at the pole some 30,000 to 70,000 years a...

The Arctic ice shelf could completely melt during summer by 2080 because of global warming, according to scientists from the DAMOCLES programme. If the situation evolves like physics predicts, the summertime Arctic shelf will completely disappear by 2080, confirmed Eberhard Fahrbach of the Alfred Wegner Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Bremerhaven. This will have consequences above and beyond those in the Antarctic, he added. For example, climate change not only threatens polar bears that live in these regions but the entire Arctic food chain. This even has consequences for the fish that ultimately ends up on our tables,” said Fahrbach. DAMOCLES (Developing...