May 29, 2019

Large-scale Images of Antarctic Landscapes at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County

The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County is hosting an exhibition of large-scale images of Antarctic landscapes by Diane Tuft, who was a 2012 participant in OPP's Antarctic Artists and Writers program. The exhibit, Frozen in Time, which opened on May 23 and runs through Jan. 20, captures "the landscape in abstract ways," according to the museum, "her 13 large-scale photographs illustrate a whole new perspective on Antarctica."

May 28, 2019

OPP-supported Study Uncovers Surprising Melting Patterns Beneath Antarctica's Ross Ice Shelf

The ROSETTA-Ice project, a three-year, multi-institutional data collection survey of Antarctic ice, has assembled an unprecedented view of the Ross Ice Shelf, its structure and how it has been changing over time. Now, in a study published this week in Nature Geoscience, the ROSETTA-Ice team details how they used Icepod, a first-of-its kind system designed to collect high-resolution data across the polar regions, to discover an ancient geologic structure that restricts where ocean water flows.

May 23, 2019

Story By "Embedded" PRI Reporter Asks the Question "Is Thwaites Glacier Doomed?"

NSF/OPP and the U.K.'s NERC: Natural Environment Research Councill are jointly supporting a five-year, 25 million dollar deployment of researchers to investigate the fate of Antarctica's Thwaites Glacier. Thwaites drains an area roughly the size of Florida or Great Britain, accounting for about 4 percent of global sea level rise - an amount that has doubled since the mid-1990s.

May 16, 2019

OPP Officials Attend Antarctic Search-and-rescue Workshop

Dr. Kelly K. Falkner was one of three U.S. Antarctic Program officials who attended an Antarctic Search-and-rescue Workshop held this week in Wellington and Christchurch, New Zealand.

May 10, 2019

Getting a Close-up Look at How Antarctic Ocean Vegetation Weathers Change

Alex Lowe, a postdoctoral student at Maryland's Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, scuba dives near NSF's Palmer Station, Antarctica. Lowe is part of a collaborative research effort involving scientists from University of Alabama, Birmingham, UA-Fairbanks, the University of Oregon, Eugene and Texas A&M University, IslandtoIce who are studying cold-water communities on the western Antarctic Peninsula and how they may be changing.

May 7, 2019

Giant Antarctic Sea Spiders Weather Warming by Getting Holey

Scientists have wondered for decades why marine animals that live in the polar oceans and the deep sea grow so large there, but nowhere else. And whether their size may make them more vulnerable to warming of polar waters. The prevailing theory - the 'oxygen-temperature hypothesis' - holds that animals living in extreme cold can grow to giant sizes because their metabolisms are very slow.