NIWA researchers have helped unlock information trapped in ancient air samples from Greenland and Antarctica that shows the amount of methane humans are emitting into the atmosphere from fossil fuels has been vastly underestimated.

But step into the Martian-like dry valleys and you’ll be treading on a bustling community of tiny organisms, like nematode worms and ultra-hardy water bears and mites.“Really, that's the charismatic megafauna of continental Antarctica,” says evolutionary ecologist Byron Adams of Brigham Young University, who is currently surveying life on the continent.

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It’s certainly possible for ordinary folk to help with collecting microplastic samples, as Airbnb intends participants to: Bergmann and her team had regular people living on a Norwegian archipelago pack up snow samples for a study themselves.

The fiery orange submarine, which she named Ran after the Norse goddess of the sea, hadn’t yet resurfaced from its first mission in the watery depths around the face of West Antarctica’s Thwaites Glacier.“She’s a very temperamental lady,” Wåhlin said of the $3.6 million, unmanned submarine, while peering through her binoculars on an overcast March day.

Poutama Hetaraka says he is not only looking forward to experiencing a completely different environment but also to seeing mātauranga Māori become more and more embedded in conversations about environmental management of the Earth and Antarctica in particular”.

But some researchers have found a new way to use satellites to figure out what penguins eat by capturing images of the animal’s poop deposits across Antarctica.A group of scientists studying Adélie penguins and climate change have found that the color of penguin droppings indicates whether the animals ate shrimp-like krill (reddish orange) or silverfish (blue).

But he wanted to know what was going on deep below Thwaites, where its ice met the earth.If the mysterious Thwaites Glacier were to “go bad,” it might change the course of civilization.During that 2008 expedition and another a year later, Anandakrishnan’s team performed the geologic equivalent of an ultrasound on Thwaites.

“To do that, we need to find rocks that are the right type, the right age and that are exposed.”The fossils he hopes to find are preserved in sedimentary deposits that exist in several places around the globe, but what makes Antarctica special for fossil hunters is the fact that there is no rain or snow to erode them away.After the fish died those millions of years ago, they were covered by layers of silt and mud in the river delta.

NIWA marine ecologist Dr Kimberly Goetz is leading two trips to Antarctica to study the seals as a way to examine the effectiveness of the newly-created Ross Sea Marine Protected Area (MPA) in conserving top predators.

Rather, these penguins, who were mummified by the cold, dry Antarctica environment, likely died from weather on the opposite end of the spectrum: two extremely rainy and snowy events that happened over the past 1,000 years, a new study finds.

TrilobitesNew Antarctica Map Is Like ‘Putting on Glasses for the First Time and Seeing 20/20’A high resolution terrain map of Earth’s frozen continent will help researchers better track changes on the ice as the planet warms.The Larsen C ice shelf in Antarctica in a new map made with satellites operated by a Department of Defense agency.National Geospatial-Intelligence AgencyYou may never make it to the South Pole, but you can now see Antarctica and its glaciers in unprecedented detail.