ICEFISH: International Collaborative Expedition to collect and study Fish Indigenous to Sub-antarctic Habitat.

The Antarctic and the sub-Antarctic offer natural laboratories for understanding the evolutionary impact of climate changes on the marine polar fishes, but there has been lack of access to sub-Antarctic fishes, critical for understanding evolution, population dynamics, eco-physiology and eco-biochemistry of their Antarctic relatives. ICEFISH, the first comprehensive international survey of the Sub-Antarctic marine habitat, is designed to fill these gaps.

SCAR-MarBIN supports the Antarctic science community by giving free and open access to an unprecedented mass of data relevant to understand Southern Ocean biodiversity. SCAR-MarBIN will leave a valuable legacy for future generations, in the form of an information tool that will provide a baseline reference for establishing a State of Antarctic Environment, and predicting the future for marine communities around Antarctica, which are currently facing global change.

This project – which involves scientists from two dozen countries – will examine how atmospheric processes in the Southern Hemisphere affect current climate, and provide an important baseline for assessing future climate change. COMPASS will obtain the first circumpolar snapshot of the Southern Hemisphere atmospheric environment – covering physical, chemical and ecological properties – a major observational milestone. Only by harnessing the resources of the global polar community can this multinational project achieve the depth of investigation required to improve knowledge of future climate change and its impacts.

Polarstern’s biggest fish catch in 24 years of research in Antarctic waters. New hope for commercial fisheries? Quite the opposite, a good catch doesn’t necessarily mean that depleted stocks have recovered. Five tons of marbled Antarctic cod (Notothenia rossii), now that was surely a big surprise to scientists and crew alike considering that previous and subsequent hauls barely ever reaped such plentiful harvests. Their shimmering silver and dark blue bodies, which can grow up to 70cm, were piled on the aft deck of Polarstern. In combination with previous stock assessments, fisheries biologists onboard interpreted the catch as a sampling of a discrete, small-scale aggregation of this fish species. ...

Polarstern’s biggest fish catch in 24 years of research in Antarctic waters. New hope for commercial fisheries? Quite the opposite, a good catch doesn’t necessarily mean that depleted stocks have recovered. Five tons of marbled Antarctic cod (Notothenia rossii), now that was surely a big surprise to scientists and crew alike considering that previous and subsequent hauls barely ever reaped such plentiful harvests. Their shimmering silver and dark blue bodies, which can grow up to 70cm, were piled on the aft deck of Polarstern. In combination with previous stock assessments, fisheries biologists onboard interpreted the catch as a sampling of a discrete, small-scale aggregation of this fish species. ...

IceCube is a neutrino observatory for astrophysics to be installed at the South Pole over seven austral summers ending in 2011. IceCube will look for extremely high-energy neutrinos coming from the northern sky whose sources are active galactic nuclei, supernova remnents, gamma-ray bursts, and active supernovae. The IceCube In-Ice detector will consist of a minimum of 4800 optical modules deployed on 80 vertical strings buried 1450 to 2450 meters under the surface of the ice, and an IceTop surface air-shower detector array comprised of a minimum of 320 optical modules. By early 2008, one half of the detector, 40 strings with 2400 optical modules, was collecting, storing and analyzing data. Weekly updates during the austral season, November-January, are posted here.

IceCube is an international project sponsored and conducted by the United States and several non-U.S. countries. The United States National Science Foundation supplies funds for the design, development, fabrication, procurement, testing, drilling and operations of the project at the South Pole.

This project links together multidisciplinary interests in the region of West Antarctica where the ice sheet discharges into the Amundsen Sea. It is one of the most active ice sheet areas, is already contributing a significant fraction of the increasing sea level, and holds the potential to dwarf other sea level contributions in the future. Aside from routine satellite coverage that monitor elevation and surface features, information about the area is limited. Our project will greatly advance our knowledge of ice dynamics of the area, the basal conditions, sub-shelf oceanic interactions, atmospheric transport of incoming snow, and historical record of ice extent. These studies will be conducted with the direct intention of supplying the involved modeling experts with necessary data to construct, initialize and validate advanced full-stress tensor models of ice flow.

ANDRILL (ANtarctic geologic DRILLing) is a multinational collaboration of over 200 scientists, drillers, engineers, technicians, students and educators from Germany, Italy, New Zealand and the United States. The goal is to recover long stratigraphic records along the continental margins of Antarctica by drilling from an ice shelf or sea ice platform. By interpreting these sedimentary rock records, scientists can understand how Antarctica’s ice sheet has advanced and retreated over time. The ANDRILL website has a fantastic range of information for scientists, teachers, and media.