Here's an incredibly cool video showing the prow of a massive ice breaking ship as it plows through Antarctica's Ross Sea. The footage is sped up, to pack two months of travel into five minutes. But, unlike a lot of time-lapse videos, this one also has a really informative audio track, in which marine scientist Cassandra Brooks waxes poetic about the many different kinds of ice and explains why she and her team were out there, breaking through the stuff, to begin with.

Bonus: At the end, you get to see the absolute adorableness that is penguins on high-speed fast forward.

Via Deep Sea News

Antarctica: A Year On Ice looks like it's going to offer a damn fine supply of polar landscape porn.

Be sure to stick through to the final scene of the trailer, which is awe-inspiring in an entirely different way.

One has to be able to give the other person mental elbow room. During our winter, when a person settled into the sofa in the salon with a book and started reading, he or she was not interrupted.

Keeping quiet when the person is close enough to practically read one's thoughts, is a matter of self-discipline, fuelled by caring.

The only exception to our silence rule was for boat-related safety issues. The boat, for obvious reasons of survival, always came first.

Or as I like to call it, Cape Fuckthiswearegoinghome.

Sadly, Antarctica's Cape Goodenough (pictured here on National Geographic's Political Map of the World) was not named by a less-then-intrepid band of explorers who decided that seeing the coastline of Antarctica was plenty of adventure for them, thankyouverymuch.

Instead, it's named for William Goodenough, admiral in the British Royal Navy. Yes. Admiral Goodenough. I'm sure the troops were enthused.

But wait, there's more. In the 1930s and 1940s, the admiral was apparently involved in the creation of comfortable, dormitory-style housing for international post-graduate students in London. Today, the buildings are known as ... Goodenough College.

Underwater, Antarctica's Weddell seals are fast-moving, graceful predators, catching and eating as much as 100 pounds of food per day. They dine on squids and fish and have been known to enjoy the occasional penguin or two.

On land, they are hilariously ineffectual blobs of jelly.

You can see that dichotomy in action in this great (and long) video made by Henry Kaiser in Antarctica. Following the adventures of a baby seal on the ice and under the water, the video is peaceful, meditative and reminds me a bit of the sort of old-school Sesame Street video that would build simple, kid-friendly narratives out of nature footage and music. (The music, by the way, was written and performed by Henry Kaiser, as well.)

Despite their poor performance in land-based locomotion, Weddell seals actually live on the ice, descending into the water to hunt and mate and swim around. They use natural holes in the ice to get from above to below and back, but they also work to maintain those holes and often use their teeth to chew at the edge of the ice and make a small hole larger. At about 13 minutes into the video, you can watch a seal doing just that — rubbing its head back and forth to enlarge an opening in the ice.

And why hang out on the ice, to begin with? Simple. In the water, seals are, themselves, potential dinners for larger creatures. On land, they have no natural predators at all and can safely bask in the sun, lying on their cute and chubby bellies for so long that their body heat hollows out divots in the ice.

Henry Kaiser is kind of our man on the inside in Antarctica. He works there every year as a film maker, turning science into movies. He sent this awesome Halloween greeting from underneath the sea ice.

Bonus: He also sent us a video taken at the same spot — only this has 100% fewer wacky masks and 100% more sea anemones.

LocalWiki's Philip Neustrom says,

My non-profit, LocalWiki, has been working on this really incredible project to help document the continent of Antarctica. Most notable, at least right now, is this custom map we've pieced together from very-hard-to-find NASA aerial imagery and coastline datasets. It's probably the most beautiful thing I've ever worked on.

Check out the LocalWiki for Antarctica. The project "aims to document the full extent of human involvement on the continent," and for now is focused on a two-mile region surrounding Palmer Station.

This is a detail from one of the regularly updated maps that researchers in Antarctica use when they want to leave McMurdo Station and travel across the continent's sea ice. It shows the well-traveled routes across McMurdo Sound, ice thickness measurements taken at various points along the road, and hazards like large cracks in the ice.

Towards the north end of the Sound, you can see an island labeled, "Inaccessible Island". I asked Henry Kaiser — a musician and filmmaker who has spent the last decade working with scientists on the frozen continent — about why that island was inaccessible. After all, I didn't see any major cracks or hazards around it. Seems like you could traverse the ice to the island just fine.

Turns out, I was misunderstanding. Inaccessible isn't a designation. Inaccessible is the island's official name. Even though it's not. Inaccessible, I mean. Named by Robert Scott, it's part of a chain of islands that all represent the remains of an ancient volcanic crater. The name apparently comes from the fact that Inaccessible Island is incredibly steep, so while you can reach it, getting onto the damn thing seems to be a lot harder.

Inaccessible Island in McMurdo Sound is not to be confused with the Inaccessible Island that is located in the south Atlantic about halfway between South America and Africa; nor with the Inaccessible Islands, an entire group of islands located between the tip of South America and tip of the Antarctic peninsula; nor with Inexpressible Island, an Antarctic island where part of Scott's crew on his second expedition was forced to spend the winter of 1912 living in a cave and eating penguins.

• Read about Inaccessible Island (the one in McMurdo Sound) in the report of Robert Scott's first expedition to Antarctica, published in 1907.

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Photo: Cape Royds Adélie Penguin Rookery. (Google Street View)

Today, Google is launching access to a new collection of hi-res imagery from the Antarctic. In this post are some examples of those stunning vistas, shared with Boing Boing courtesy of …

Photo: Cape Royds Adélie Penguin Rookery. (Google Street View)

Today, Google is launching access to a new collection of hi-res imagery from the Antarctic. In this post are some examples of those stunning vistas, shared with Boing Boing courtesy of Google. Alex Starns, Technical Program Manager for the Street View team, writes:

Back in September 2010, we launched the first Street View imagery of the Antarctic, enabling people from more habitable lands to see penguins in Antarctica for the first time. Today we’re bringing you additional panoramic imagery of historic Antarctic locations that you can view from the comfort of your homes. We’ll be posting this special collection to our World Wonders site, where you can learn more about the history of South Pole exploration.

With the help of the Polar Geospatial Center at the University of Minnesota and the New Zealand Antarctic Heritage Trust, we’ve added 360-imagery of many important spots, inside and out, such as the South Pole Telescope, Shackleton's hut, Scott’s hut, Cape Royds Adélie Penguin Rookery and the Ceremonial South Pole.

More about the project here. And more images below!

Photo: The Ceremonial South Pole. (Google Street View)

The interior of Shackleton’s Hut shows supplies used in early 20th Century Antarctic Expeditions. (Google Street View)

Photo: The South Pole Telescope. (Google Street View)

Photo: The South Pole Telescope. (Google Street View)

Photo: The South Pole Telescope. (Google Street View)

Photo: The South Pole Telescope. (Google Street View)

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Between 1910 and 1913, surgeon George Levick traveled with Robert Scott through Antarctica on a mission to reach the South Pole. Along the way, Scott's team recorded their observations of Antarctica and its wildlife, observations that were later published in scientific journals. At least, most of the observations were published. Some of Levick's notes ended up being left out of the official journals, only printed in pamphlet form, like some kind of academic Tijuana Bible.

The reason: Those notes were full of Levick's horrified documentation of depraved penguin sex acts—tales so unfit for polite society that Levick actually wrote most of them in Greek, rather than English.

Recently rediscovered and translated, these notes have now been published for the first time in the journal Polar Record. The excerpts printed on the LiveScience site read like something from an addendum to Heart of Darkness.

"This afternoon I saw a most extraordinary site [sic]. A Penguin was actually engaged in sodomy upon the body of a dead white throated bird of its own species. The act occurred a full minute, the position taken up by the cock differing in no respect from that of ordinary copulation, and the whole act was gone through down to the final depression of the cloaca."

In another entry, this one written in English on Dec. 6 of that year, he wrote: "I saw another act of astonishing depravity today. A hen which had been in some way badly injured in the hindquarters was crawling painfully along on her belly. I was just wondering whether I ought to kill her or not, when a cock noticed her in passing, and went up to her. After a short inspection he deliberately raped her, she being quite unable to resist him."

Levick described penguins that waddled about the colony's outskirts terrorizing any straying chicks as "little knots of hooligans" in his pamphlet. "The crimes which they commit are such as to find no place in this book, but it is interesting indeed to note that, when nature intends them to find employment, these birds, like men, degenerate in idleness."

Read the full story on LiveScience

See the abstract in Polar Record

Thanks Chris Baker!

I love this video of an iceberg collapsing in on itself in Wilhelmina Bay, Antarctica. (Word of warning, the people filming this loved the experience even more than I loved watching it, so much so that you may want to turn your speakers down.)

There are two kinds of icebergs, tabular and non-tabular. The tabular ones are what they sound like, big flat sheets of ice. Non-tabular are different—irregular shapes that become even more irregular as bits and pieces of them melt. Judging by the arched shape this iceberg had taken on, it probably falls into the non-tabular category. Implosion happens when melting weakens key structural support within that shape and bits of the iceberg begin to crash in on itself, accelerating the breakup. Both tabular and non-tabular icebergs and catastrophically fail like this, though.

Another fun iceberg fact: There are six size categories we sort icebergs by. Four of them have pretty predictable names: "Small", "Medium", "Large", and "Very Large". But below "small" are two size categories with a little more whimsy.

Icebergs with a hight of less than 3.3 feet and a length less than 16 feet are called "Growlers".

If the height shorter than 16 feet and the length shorter than 49 feet, then the iceberg is called, adorably, "a Bergy Bit". Yes, that is a technical term.

Video Link

The United States Antarctic station at McMurdo Sound was opened in 1956. Originally it was operated by the Navy, rather than the National Science Foundation. This photo was taken during the Navy years, in November of 1958.

The flat white snow at the bottom of the photo is the frozen McMurdo Sound. The 'road' is the landing strip for the U.S. Navy planes which supported the U.S. Antarctic Program when this photo was taken. You can see the airplanes parked near McMurdo Station, along the coastline. This U.S. Navy photo was donated by Charlotte Koch, whose husband Richard Koch was a P2V Navy pilot in Antarctica.

The photo (and that quote) comes from a collection of historical photos in the United States Antarctic Program's photo library.

The history of the McMurdo site turns out to be pretty interesting. The first human presence there dates to 1902. It's where Robert Scott made landfall and, up until the Navy arrived in 1955, the only buildings at the site were Scott's hut, and a couple of other shelters built to house Scott's equipment. By 1960, there were 90 permanent structures.

But this isn't a story of runaway growth. Scientists in Antarctica recognized the need to preserve the ecology of the continent pretty early on. Today, there are about 100 buildings at McMurdo and the facility hasn't been allowed to expand much beyond the landscape impacted by humans during the first 10-15 years of the station's existence.

Read a 2008 paper from the journal Polar Geography about McMurdo's history and efforts to document and limit the station's growth.

See more pictures from the Antarctic Photo Library.

Numbers can be powerful things, but they don't necessarily help the average person grasp what's actually going on in science. Instead, personal stories tend to make a bigger impact. And that's understandable. Things you can see—or things that someone can show you—are going to stick in your head a bit more than a barrage of data.

This is especially a problem, I think, with climate change. Some of the largest impact of climate change, so far, have happened in places far removed from the experiences of the people who create the most anthropogenic greenhouse gases. So it's often hard to take the idea "the Earth is getting warmer" and really grok what that actually means.

That's why people like Will Steger are important. Steger is an explorer and science communicator who has won the National Geographic Society's John Oliver La Gorce Medal—an award that's also been given to Amelia Earhart, Robert Peary, Roald Amundsen and Jacques Cousteau.

He does most of his work in the Arctic and Antarctic, places where he has clearly seen the results of climate change. In a video of a presentation at the University of Minnesota, Steger shows you his experiences—and what they mean. How has climate change altered the landscape of the poles? What does that mean for the future of the Earth? Steger does a good job of making the data feel like something real.

I wish I could figure out how to embed this, but you should go watch it, nonetheless. It's a long video, but worth the time.

Henry Kaiser—filmmaker, musician, Antarctic research diver and BoingBoing guest blogger—took a series of infrared portraits of scientists and staff at the McMurdo Research Station. I really like the way these infrared photos feel like they capture the cold environment better than a normal photo would. Another bonus: I keep having to remind myself that, no, everybody in Antarctica has not dyed their hair blue.

One more incredibly cool video from research diver, musician, and filmmaker Henry Kaiser. Henry says:

"Since support workers in town cannot make their usual recreational trips out onto the sea ice, the powers-that-be at McMurdo Station installed the OB TUBE within walking distance of town.

Anyone can climb down the ladder and watch us divers at work under the ice. The snow was bulldozed off of the sea ice around the observation tube, creating a very light environment; which seems to have attracted an enormous population of larval and juvenile ice fish that form great clouds around the tube."

Suddenly, I wish I were washing dishes in Antarctica.

Video Link

This video was made by Henry Kaiser, a musician and research diver who guest blogged here yesterday about the problems caused by thinning sea ice in Antarctica. The film takes you on a tour of McMurdo Station and the research being done there by Gretchen Hoffman of the University of California Santa Barbara.

Kaiser dives for different researchers every year. This year, he's working with Hoffman's team, helping them study the effects of climate change on ocean life. Specifically, Hoffman has Kaiser out collecting Antarctic sea urchins so that her team can extract the animals' sperm and eggs to test the development of sea urchin zygotes in differing conditions of PH and temperature.

There's great footage in here of human life above the ice, and animal life below. It's a bit long, but I recommend taking the time to watch the whole thing.

Video Link

The Polar regions of the Arctic and the Antarctic are both cold. Beyond that, you can’t really talk about conditions at one pole based on the conditions at the other. Case in point: Sea ice. Since 1979, there’s been a significant decrease in Arctic sea ice—about 4% per decade—correlated closely to an increase in global average temperatures.

But Antarctica is different. Averaged out, sea ice around the Frozen Continent has grown by a little less than 1% per decade. From place-to-place, season-to-season, and year-to-year, however, the trends in Antarctic sea ice have shown a lot more variability than those in the Arctic. In other words, there’s a lot we don’t know about sea ice in the Antarctic and, right now, the data we have is too noisy to say much about it for sure. At least, in a big picture sort of way.

In the small picture, though, this year has been tough one on the Ross Sea, near the McMurdo scientific research station. The sea ice in McMurdo Sound is thin; the snow is thick, and both those things have big implications for the scientists who normally work out on the sea ice. Henry Kaiser is a diver, filmmaker, and musician who has spent the last 10 years aiding scientists on research dives off the Antarctic coast. In this story, he talks about how thinner-than-normal sea ice affects scientists’ ability to do their jobs.

My ninth season down here at McMurdo Station, Antarctica has been a season like no other. It's always been an easy thing, in seasons past, to travel where our work might take us, over the frozen surface of the Ross Sea. Seal scientists, fish scientists, and many others are used to scurrying about via snowmobiles and larger tracked vehicles across the frozen ocean. But this year, as a result of much thinner ice, thicker snow cover that prevents ice formation, and higher ambient temperatures, we are suddenly faced with a giant Triangle of Inaccessibility. The Triangle threatened to hinder our work or prevent it altogether. Take a look at that big red isosceles triangle on the map, it's about 7 x 7 x 11 miles in size and it's where most of the scientists on the local sea ice usually conduct their work.

Let's zoom out on that last map and look at the Western side of Ross Island, just downslope from the massive and active Erebus Volcano. This map is what we were shown at the beginning of the season. That big red area was a forbidden zone to vehicle traffic. Some scientists could request helicopter time to get out to their field sites; but it looked nearly impossible to set up the normal field camps and commute back and forth to "town.”

The friends and colleagues here who work on the ice have pulled hard together in the past month. They have found ways to get into the triangle by snowmobile and Pisten Bully—a snow-grooming vehicle like the kind used to maintain ski trails. A plywood bridge is being constructed over the Tent-EGT crack; that will prevent our vehicles from being swallowed up by the sea.

Cracks have formed in the thin ice and daily measurements of the cracks that need to be traversed are taken, as those cracks could become impassible at anytime. Nobody wants to quickly sink to the bottom of the Ross Sea in the frozen coffin of $100,000 tracked vehicle. Take a look at the situation map in the hall of the Crary lab here:

Folks add to this sea ice hackers' map every day and we all stay in touch with each other, trying to figure new ways to get our work accomplished. Some areas are still inaccessible and larger vehicles like those that we use to drill dive holes will never be able to enter the Triangle this season. In order to grab some special sea urchins for my boss, Gretchen Hofmann, we had to take a helicopter out to Cape Evans, about 20 miles north, and use a "hotsie" hole melter (made here from a converted carpet cleaning machine) to melt our dive hole. In the process, bad weather got us stuck there overnight and we got to camp out next to Robert Scott's historic hut. This week, I'll head out to Cape Royds, 30 miles from station, by helicopter with the penguin researchers, who don't have any way to drive to the Adelie penguin colony they’re studying.

Looking back over the past years to 2005, we can see that the sea ice edge, the place where the frozen ocean turns to open water, has been getting closer and closer every year. Is climate change to blame? Nobody is sure.

One reason that the sea ice edge was farther out in the earlier years of this graphic, was due to the massive iceberg, B-15, that blocked McMurdo Sound for a few years. B-15 prevented the ice in the sound from breaking up and let much thicker ice develop there. This 20-foot-thick sea ice was quite resistant to being broken up by winter storms. As divers, we hoped each year that the ice in the Sound would break up and go out; hoping for easier dive-hole making and more light down below. At the end of the last Austral Summer that ice did finally go out. But it did not reform in the way that it always has in local institutional memory. Much heavier snowfall than is usual in this Antarctic desert covered the ice with an insulating blanket that prevented the low temperatures topside from forming thicker sea ice down below. Temperatures topside have been warmer, too.

Take a look at this chart.

I can tell you there is big environmental change here this season, as is evidenced by the Triangle. Being one of the folks here who gets to spend a good deal of time under that ice, in the 28° F waters of the Ross Sea, I can report that there is also a big change in visibility this year. Our normally 2000 foot visibility is reduced to 300 feet or 400 feet. The water seems almost milky or chalky, and visibility is worsening as the season continues in an accelerating manner.

Ice has been thin and snow-covered in many pre-B-15 seasons, without any change in visibility; so we know this odd and poor visibility is not a result of that. It is a change that has not been see before and we don’t even have a guess as to why it is occurring. The National Science Foundation likes to say that Antarctica is the canary in the coal mine for climate change—I hope that meme makes the point that changes like this demand our attention. I 've even noticed a few jellies and other creatures more associated with the open water appearing way back under the sea ice. They don't usually show up until the ice edge is much closer, a month or so from now. Yet another mystery of this very odd season.

Has a significant alteration in climate brought on these environmental changes? Will this be the new norm, and will scientists no longer have their fish hut camps out on the sea ice? Time and further research will tell. Something is going on here that has been a wake-up call for those of us who work on the ice this season. We will continue to react to a changing environment and try to figure out why it might be changing.

Finally, here's the most recent, official Sea Ice Map.

When I recycle, I have to separate out metal, plastic, chipboard, glass, plain paper, glossy paper, and newsprint. That sounds like a lot of separating, until you compare it to the recycling protocol at McMurdo Scientific Research Station, Antarctica.

There is nothing at McMurdo that wasn't flown or shipped there from far away. That costs a lot money. And, almost as importantly, it costs space. A crate of Ramen means less room for people, scientific instruments, etc. Nothing arrives in Antarctica without a purpose.

On the flip side of that coin: Everything that is brought to McMurdo must leave, in one way or another. There aren't any landfills in Antarctica. All the trash produced must be either burned, reused there, or flown back to civilization.

All of that means McMurdo has developed what is probably the most elaborate recycling program in the entire world. The trash matrix you see above is just half of the full list. You can see the other half after the jump — as well as a few extra recycling bins that turned up mysteriously one night.

The following bins are not officially part of the McMurdo Station recycling program. But they are pretty wonderful.

Among the things that can now be recycled at McMurdo: Your dreams.

Glitter is also a limited resource. Please re-use and recycle.

Not all recycling is fun recycling.

And, finally, another view of the Glitter recycling container, as a Unicorn Chaser. On the left, an actual recycling container.

You all owe Henry Kaiser a huge round of applause for taking these photographs and sending them to me. Alternately, you can show your appreciation by visiting his YouTube site, which is full of amazing videos of life beneath the Antarctic sea ice.

Dayton's Wall is an underwater geologic formation named for Paul Dayton, a marine ecologist who studies the lives and interactions between seafloor-dwelling organisms. Located in Antarctica, in an area of the Ross Sea between McMurdo Station and Cape Armitage, Dayton's Wall is a great place to spot creatures that live on the rocky Antarctic seafloor.

This footage of life on Dayton's Wall was shot by Henry Kaiser, a man with a really awesome CV. Kaiser is a musician and filmmaker, and for the last decade he's also worked as a research diver, conducting dives beneath the Antarctic sea ice on behalf of scientists stationed at McMurdo.

Kaiser has turned some of his footage into music videos, set to songs performed by Nik Bärtsch's RONIN. With the artist's permission, Kaiser made two music videos. This one, and another set just beneath the surface of the ice. They're both beautiful and haunting, and make me want to find out more about Nik Bärtsch's RONIN, who I'd never heard of before.

We'll have more from Henry Kaiser soon, including an upcoming guest blog post. Watch this space for Antarctic wonders. And, in the meantime, check out his YouTube page. He posts new videos every day.

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