With a gargantuan crack slowly splitting it apart, Antarctica‘s fastest-melting glacier is about to lose a chunk of ice larger than all of New York City, scientists say. (Also see “Manhattan-Size Ice Island Cracks in Half.”) The crevasse stretches 19 miles (30 kilometers) long and up to 260 feet (80 meters) wide, as shown in [...]

The first-ever map of how Antarctica’s ice is moving across that continent has been created by researchers at the University of California, Irvine. The map, along with an associated animation (below) developed by NASA, reveals that ice is flowing fastest in coastal ice shelves and their tributaries, shown in this illustration in bright purple and [...]

An irreversible climate “tipping point” could occur within the next 20 years as a result of the release of huge quantities of organic carbon locked away as frozen plant matter in the vast permafrost region of the Arctic, scientists have found.Billions of tons of frozen leaves and roots that have lain undisturbed for thousands of [...]

Perth’s drinking water supplies from dams will run out by the end of next summer even with decent rainfall, according to predictions by the Centre for Water Research. By then, Perth and the South-West would become solely reliant on water supplied from the already stressed Gnangara Mound aquifer and the Kwinana desalination plant, director Jorg [...]

The Antarctic Peninsula has warmed rapidly for the last half-century or more, and recent studies have shown that an adjacent area, continental West Antarctica, has steadily warmed for at least 30 years, but scientists haven’t been sure why. New University of Washington research shows that rising sea surface temperatures in the area of the Pacific [...]

Scientists who predicted a few years ago that Arctic summers could be ice-free by 2013 now say summer sea ice will probably be gone in this decade. The original prediction, made in 2007, gained Wieslaw Maslowski’s team a deal of criticism from some of their peers. Now they are working with a new computer model [...]

While the discussions continue about climate change, this is a sobering presentation as to the outcome for the Arctic and some of its inhabitants. var showHover=false;

Judging by the weather, the world seems to have flipped upside down. For two winters running, an Arctic chill has descended on Europe, burying that continent in snow and ice. Last year in the United States, historic blizzards afflicted the mid-Atlantic region. This winter the Deep South has endured unusual snowstorms and severe cold, and [...]

Scientists have uncovered what appears to be a further dramatic increase in the leakage of methane gas that is seeping from the Arctic seabed. Methane is about 20 times more potent than CO2 in trapping solar heat. The findings come from measurements of carbon fluxes around the north of Russia, led by Igor Semiletov from [...]

Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute and Author of Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization We are entering a new era, one of rapid and often unpredictable climate change. In fact, the new climate norm is change. The 25 warmest years on record have come since 1980. And the 10 warmest years since [...]