McMurdo Station Antarctica

When penguins get a call of nature, they’re generally not too fussy where they go. And as they may stay in the same area for up to eight months at a time, the ice under their feet can lose its pure white lustre by the time they move on. Luckily, scientists have a reason to be excited over the excrement, using the reddish-brown areas of guano (sea bird poo) to plot the movements of emperor penguin breeding colonies. Emperor penguins, among the largest in the world, are hard to track during Antarctica’s harsh winters - but now scientists can now track by satellite The ... Read Full Story

Reduced: 64% of original size [ 990 x 602 ] - Click to view full image A full moon and 25 second exposure allowed sufficient light into this photo taken at Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station during the long Antarctic night in July of 2005. The new station can be seen at far left, power plant in the center and the old mechanic's garage in the lower right. Red lights are used outside during the winter darkness as their spectrum does not pollute the sky, allowing scientists to conduct astrophysical studies without artificial light interference. The green light in the sky is the aurora australis. ... Read Full Story

Scientists looking for lost penguins stumbled upon an effective method: Follow their poop from space. In remote Antarctica, about one-and-a-half times bigger than the United States, researchers have been unable to figure out just where colonies of emperor penguins live and if their population is in peril. It's harder still because emperor penguins, featured in the film "March of the Penguins," breed on sea ice, which scientists say will shrink significantly in the future because of global warming. Because the large penguins stay on the same ice for months, their poop stains make them stand out from space. Scientists at the British Antarctic Survey ... Read Full Story

BONN, Germany (Reuters) - Ten new colonies of emperor penguins have been found in Antarctica after satellite photos showing brownish stains on the ice turned out to be the excrement of thousands of birds. The findings, revealed by the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) on Tuesday, will help understand penguin populations and the vulnerability to global warming of the breeding colonies which are on sea ice. "We now reckon there are 38 colonies in Antarctica, 10 of them previously unknown," Phil Trathan, a BAS penguin ecologist, told Reuters of the study in the journal Global Ecology and Biogeography. "That's potentially a massive change in the ... Read Full Story

Down in Antarctica, November marks the end of spring, the beginning of austral summer, and the beginning of Antarctica's cruise season. The Sun just rose for the first time in 6 months on September 22nd, and is now visible in the sky all the time. Recent studies in Antarctica have brought new insights into the origins of deep sea octopus species (a 30 million-year-old ancestor from Antarctic waters), volcanic contributions to disappearing antarctic ice, and the effects of increasing numbers of icebergs scouring the seafloor. Collected here are 32 photographs of Antarctica from the past several years. (32 photos total) Reduced: 64% of original ... Read Full Story

Introducing Halley Station (75°34âS 26°34âW), located on the 150m thick, continually moving, Brunt Ice Shelf in Antarctica. Named after the Astronomer Edmond Halley, the current station (Halley V) is the fifth to be built. It is the British Antarctic Surveyâs most remote research station and has been operational since 1956 (established by the Royal Society for the International Geophysical Year, 1957-58).  Halley Station (also known as Base Z) has presented itself in many forms since those first buildings in 1956. The extreme environment challenges even the most thought out buildings. Blizzards and snow drifts eventually bury any structures left on the ground and ... Read Full Story

A team from British Antarctic Survey and University of Hamburg combed the land, sea and shores of the South Orkney Islands last year, near the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula, using scuba divers and trawled nets to capture creatures as deep as 1,500 meters. Animals recorded were then checked with a century of literature and modern databases and the team concluded that there are over 1200 known marine and land species, including sea urchins, free-swimming worms, crustaceans and mollusks, mites and birds. Five were previously unknown to science. “This is the first time anybody has done an inventory like this in the polar regions," ... Read Full Story