During this session with the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water, I raised with them that in 2021, the Coalition government abandoned plans to build an all-weather, all-season paved runway in the Australian Antarctic Territory. Minister Watt confirmed that there are currently no plans to build such a runway and noted that Australia continues to rely on a blue ice runway during summer – leaving our bases largely isolated from the outside world for most of the year...| Malcolm Roberts
After three busy days in South Georgia, the Silver Endeavour sailed for Elephant Island in the South Shetland Islands, off the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula. Elephant Island is where Ernest Shackleton’s crew was stranded on a bleak and inhospitable small beach while their captain and five others made a treacherous 17-day, 800-mile journey across...| Dirona Around the World
Departing the Falklands, we traveled 900nm over three nights to reach our first stop in South Georgia at Elsehul. Here we toured the area by tender, sighting a large rockhopper penguin rookery perched on the cliffs, and hundreds of baby and adult seals. Among them was a relatively rare blonde Leucistic fur seal. Not quite...| Dirona Around the World
The island of South Georgia lies about 870 miles off the Antarctic Peninsula and supports the largest King Penguin population in the world, exceeding a million during the breeding season. It also contains the grave of British explorer Ernest Shackleton, who in 1916 famously saved his entire crew after their ship, the Endurance, was trapped in…| Dirona Around the World
This is not supposed to be happening, according to the climate models. Symbol image: NASA While the headlines relentlessly holler about “exploding global warming” and “dramatic melting” of the polar caps, the South Pole is telling a starkly different story. Here reports Germany’s Report 24. On October 15, the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station registered an […]| NoTricksZone
Five well-publicised geoengineering proposals to reduce the impact of climate change in the polar regions are "extremely unlikely" to work, and are a risk to the environment, say NZ and international experts in a new paper. The researchers looked at ideas like injecting aerosol clouds into the atmo| www.sciencemediacentre.co.nz
This miniseries features the tradition of ‘PhD hat’ making in German research institutes and universities. For those of you unfamiliar with this idea (as I once was), this is one of the final milestones a graduate student has before they are officially a “Dr.”. Upon the successful defense of a thesis, the labmates of the PhD student craft a graduation hat from a mishmash of scrap cardboard and memorabilia. Hours of work go into these beloved pieces, and you can often find these hand-m...| Cryospheric Sciences
As we are starting into our annual blog summer break, we reflect on what summer can mean for polar researchers (including some fieldwork saudades ). As an Arctic or Alpine cryo-scientist, chances are that you are somewhere in between vacation, fieldwork or trying to work through data while everyone else is free. If you, like us, did not have your vacation yet or do not have any fieldwork coming up this summer (or it’s been a while because you do your fieldwork on the Southern hemisphere), l...| Cryospheric Sciences
