Showing 332 items
20 January, 2025 by Peter Convey
Invertebrates are ubiquitous. Diverse in form and function, they play crucial roles in ecosystems: for example as food for other organisms, as pollinators, and as decomposers. Invertebrate species vastly outnumber…1 January, 2025 by Thomas Bauska
Beneath the surface of Antarctica lies a near perfect record of changes in the atmosphere composition over hundreds of thousands of years. This unique archive allows us to reconstruct atmospheric…1 January, 2025 by James Smith, Kelly Hogan
During Quaternary glaciations, ice sheets expanded from continental interiors across continental shelves and delivered large volumes of sediment, transported by meltwater, and icebergs to the marine environment. Glaciomarine sediments preserve…1 January, 2025 by Claire Allen, Dieter Tetzner
Here, we summarize the diatom research topics and applications that have the broadest relevance and importance for Antarctic studies. From the Southern Ocean we focus on biogeography, sea surface temperature…1 January, 2025 by Gareth Marshall
The Southern Annular Mode (SAM) is an important pattern of Southern Hemisphere circulation variability: it accounts for between 15 and 30 or more percent of the total variability of the…1 January, 2025 by Peter Convey
Increasing global morbidity is often associated with communicable or noncommunicable diseases; however, adverse drug effects have also been linked with an increase in mortality worldwide. This has emphasized the need…Read more on Chapter 36 – Biomedical applications of algal-based products
1 December, 2024 by Alex Brisbourne
Early borehole and surface distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) experiments have demonstrated the viability of the method in glacial settings and allowed new insights.17 July, 2024 by Donya Yazdani
Multi-population evolutionary and swarm intelligence dynamic optimization algorithms are the most flexible and effective methods for solving dynamic optimization problems. In a dynamic optimization problem, the search space is affected…24 April, 2024 by Peter Convey
Pharmaceuticals are therapeutic drugs used to treat or prevent human or animal diseases. The incomplete breakdown of these drugs in the body can lead to their release into the environment…23 April, 2024 by Mark Clilverd
From a distance, we perceive the Sun as an unchanging source of light. While this is functionally true on a day-to-day human level, at a scientific level, the Sun has…Read more on Space Weather: A Global Hazard from Space to New Zealand’s Technological Infrastructure
1 January, 2024 by Peter Convey
Terrestrial environments of Antarctica include some of the most extreme on Earth, challenging the very existence of life itself. This article outlines briefly the geological and biological history of the…24 June, 2023 by Peter Convey
Despite their impressive diversity and ecosystem relevance, insects are undervalued and rarely considered in conservation efforts, except for those that are medically or economically important. In terms of funding and…23 June, 2023 by Peter Convey
Microalgae are photosynthetic microorganisms that thrive in many different environments. They are present across ecosystems globally and possess bioactive compounds that can be exploited as natural products with potential application…Read more on Microalgae-based products and their immunomodulatory activities
25 May, 2023 by Simon Morley
The Falkland Islands marine environment host a mix of temperate and subantarctic species. This review synthesizes baseline information regarding ontogenetic migration patterns and trophic interactions in relation to oceanographic dynamics…21 March, 2023 by Elisa Bergami
This chapter describes the best current definitions for nanoplastics in terms of specific origin, size, properties, their behavior in aquatic media, and ecotoxic interactions with other aquatic pollutants and living…Read more on Nanoplastics in Urban Waters: Recent Advances in the Knowledge Base
4 January, 2023 by Kevin Hughes, Peter Convey
Antarctic terrestrial biodiversity is simple compared with other regions of the Earth, with many higher taxonomic groups not represented owing to the continent’s isolation, the severe climatic conditions and the…1 September, 2022 by Richard Phillips
Seabirds are among the most threatened of all vertebrate groups. Here we review their conservation status and key aspects of the main threats and some emerging threats. Bycatch in fisheries…Read more on Chapter 2 – Conservation status and overview of threats to seabirds
30 June, 2022 by Richard Phillips
Antarctica and the Southern Ocean are among the world´s regions that have been most impacted by climate change. This chapter provides an overview of the latest scientific evidence of climate…Read more on Antarctic seabirds as indicators of climate change
1 January, 2022 by Philip Leat
Abundant mantle-derived ultramafic xenoliths occur in Cenozoic (7.7-1.5 Ma) mafic alkaline volcanic rocks along the former active margin of West Antarctica, that extends from the northern Antarctic Peninsula to Jones…1 January, 2022 by David Barnes
Blue carbon held in polar organisms has been little considered in terms of global carbon sinks and impacts on climate change. Although the magnitude of sinks is small compared with…Read more on Blue Carbon Sinks on Polar Seabeds and Their Feedbacks on Climate Change
1 January, 2022 by Felipe Simoes, Peter Convey
Los impactos del cambio climático están afectando fuertemente los ecosistemas, comunidades y especies terrestres y acuáticas de las regiones polares y subpolares. La ecorregión subantártica de Magallanes, debido a sus…1 December, 2021 by Markus Frey
Anthropogenically driven changes in the cryosphere (mainly climate warming, but also land-use changes and increasing industrial and transportation activities) are changing how the cryosphere interacts with the atmosphere, which is,…27 October, 2021 by Claus-Dieter Hillenbrand
Technological advances in the study and dating of both land and marine glacial geologic features, combined with both glaciological and post-glacial isostatic rebound modelling, have developed knowledge and understanding of…Read more on Antarctic Ice Sheet changes since the Last Glacial Maximum
1 October, 2021 by Dominic Hodgson, Fausto Ferraccioli, Claus-Dieter Hillenbrand, Lara Perez Miguel, Richard Hindmarsh, Robert Larter, Richard Hindmarsh
The legacy of the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research’s (SCAR) PAIS strategic research programme includes not only breakthrough scientific discoveries, but it is also the story of a long-standing deep…Read more on Past Antarctic ice sheet dynamics (PAIS) and implications for future sea-level change
1 October, 2021 by Jane Francis
Antarctica underwent a complex evolution over the course of the Cenozoic, which influenced the history of the Earth’s climate system. The Eocene-Oligocene boundary is a divide of this history when…Read more on The Eocene-Oligocene boundary climate transition: an Antarctic perspective
1 October, 2021 by Claus-Dieter Hillenbrand, Lara Perez Miguel, Robert Larter
The past three decades have seen a sustained and coordinated effort to refine the seismic stratigraphic framework of the Antarctic margin that has underpinned the development of numerous geological drilling…Read more on Cenozoic history of Antarctic glaciation and climate from onshore and offshore studies
1 October, 2021 by Lara Perez Miguel
The Miocene to Pliocene (Neogene) occurred between 23.04 and 2.58 million years ago and includes intervals of peak global warmth where Earth’s average surface temperature was up to 8℃ warmer…17 September, 2021 by Alexander Brearley, Michael Meredith
This chapter gives an overview of recent advances in in situ observations of ocean mixing. It starts by providing a brief history of measuring ocean mixing. It then describes adaptations…17 September, 2021 by Michael Meredith
Ocean mixing exerts a fundamental influence across many elements of the Earth system, including circulation, planetary-scale climate and the ecosystem. Despite wide recognition of this importance today, research into ocean…16 September, 2021 by Michael Meredith
Ocean Mixing: Drivers, Mechanisms and Impacts contains a broad perspective on the causes of ocean mixing, with a perspective on the implications, in terms of governing ocean circulation, climate, biogeochemistry…9 June, 2021 by Philip Leat, Teal Riley
The voluminous continental margin volcanic arc of the Antarctic Peninsula is one of the major tectonic features of West Antarctica. It extends from the Trinity Peninsula and the South Shetland…Read more on Antarctic Peninsula and South Shetland Islands: Volcanology (Chapter 3.1a)
9 June, 2021 by Philip Leat, Teal Riley
The Antarctic Peninsula contains a record of continental-margin volcanism extending from Jurassic to Recent times. Subduction of the Pacific oceanic lithosphere beneath the continental margin developed after Late Jurassic volcanism…Read more on Antarctic Peninsula and South Shetland Islands: Petrology (Chapter 3.1b)
9 June, 2021 by Philip Leat, Teal Riley
Large-volume rhyolitic volcanism along the proto-Pacific margin of Gondwana consists of three major episodes of magmatism or ‘flare-ups’. The initial episode (V1) overlaps with the Karoo–Ferrar large igneous provinces at…9 June, 2021 by Philip Leat, Teal Riley
The break-up of Gondwana during the Early–Middle Jurassic was associated with flood basalt volcanism in southern Africa and Antarctica (Karoo–Ferrar provinces), and formed one of the most extensive episodes of…17 May, 2021 by Andrew Fleming, Andreas Cziferszky
Current deep learning architectures for remote sensing are trained on small datasets typically using 1 GPU without taking advantage of new innovative approaches such as distributed scale-out deep learning. In…Read more on The ExtremeEarth software architecture for Copernicus earth observation data
17 May, 2021 by Andrew Fleming, Andreas Cziferszky
ExtremeEarth is a three-year H2020 ICT research and innovation project. Its main objective is to develop Artificial Intelligence and big data technologies that scale to the large volumes of big…15 April, 2021 by Julius Rix
Landed missions which seek to explore ever-greater depths beneath planetary subsurfaces must manage the risks associated with this challenging task. When developing the most appropriate mission architecture, the designer must…Read more on DEEPER: The Drill for Extensive Exploration of Planetary Environments Using Robots
25 February, 2021 by Jaume Forcada
The Antarctic fur seal lives south of the Antarctic Polar Front and has never been reported breeding in Latin America. Individuals encountered occasionally, from Peru, norther Chile, and the Juan…Read more on Antarctic Fur Seal (Arctocephalus gazella, Peters 1875).
1 January, 2021 by Philip Leat
Abundant mantle-derived ultramafic xenoliths occur in Cenozoic (7.7-1.5 Ma) mafic alkaline volcanic rocks along the former active margin of West Antarctica, that extends from the northern Antarctic Peninsula to Jones…1 January, 2021
Cephalopods play an important role in the Antarctic ecosystem, being consumed by a wide range of predators such as whales, fish, seals, albatrosses and penguins. To understand predator-prey interactions between…Read more on Cephalopod beak guide for the Southern Ocean: An update on taxonomy (revised edition)
1 January, 2021 by Peter Convey
During the Penang Hill BioBlitz of October 2017, our survey team collected 16 morphospecies of subaerial algae for the first time from tree bark, branches and leaves, including tree tops.…Read more on First records of subaerial cyanobacteria and chlorophytes from Penang Hill.
1 January, 2021 by Philip Trathan
8 November, 2020 by Emilie Capron
The biogeochemical cycles encompass the exchange of chemical elements between reservoirs such as the atmosphere, ocean, land and lithosphere. Those exchanges involve biological, geological and chemical processes, hence the term…Read more on Biogeochemical Cycles and Aerosols Over the Last Million Years.
1 July, 2020 by Scott Hosking
Multi-output Gaussian processes (MOGPs) leverage the flexibility and interpretability of GPs while capturing structure across outputs, which is desirable, for example, in spatio-temporal modelling. The key problem with MOGPs is…Read more on Scalable exact inference in multi-output Gaussian processes
26 June, 2020 by Peter Convey
Antarctica's contemporary terrestrial biota have adapted to the continent's environmental challenges over many millions of years. It now faces the twin challenges of the multiple aspects of global and regional…16 June, 2020 by Gareth Marshall
This chapter discusses recent changes in Antarctic climate. Changes in the atmospheric circulation modes that influence Antarctic climate, namely, the Southern Annular Mode (SAM), the Amundsen Sea Low (ASL), and…16 June, 2020 by Elisabeth Biersma, Peter Convey
Antarctic terrestrial ecosystems contribute a tiny proportion of the area of the continent and host an impoverished and often cryptic biota. In recent years it has been realized that much…16 June, 2020 by Stephen Roberts
The pre-last glacial maximum (LGM) Antarctic landscape with inherited preglacial topography (Sugden and Jamieson, 2018) was significantly overprinted by multiple ice advances and retreats driven by Milankovitch’s orbital forcing parameters…Read more on Chapter 5 – Tracing the deglaciation since the Last Glacial Maximum
16 June, 2020 by Dominic Hodgson
Changes in relative sea level (RSL) underpin the geomorphology and biology of the Antarctic coastal zone. They are a product of changes in regional ice dynamics, glacio-isostacy and eustatic sea…Read more on Chapter 6 – Relative sea level changes in the Antarctic coastal zone
1 January, 2020 by Liz Thomas
Evidence from various climate proxies provides us with increasingly reliable proof that only in the past 10 millennia were natural systems more or less as we see them at the…Read more on The last three millions of unequal spring thaws
1 January, 2020 by Peter Ward, Will Goodall-Copestake
This chapter summarizes global patterns and mechanisms of both ecological and historical crustacean biogeography resulting in the contemporary species distributions described over the past decades. In the pelagic realm, hydrographic…1 November, 2019 by Peter Fretwell
In this paper we test the use of a deep learning approach to automatically count Wandering Albatrosses in Very High Resolution (VHR) satellite imagery. We use a dataset of manually…Read more on Using deep learning to count albatrosses from space
1 August, 2019 by Hugh Corr
We propose an algorithm to evaluate the direction of arrival (DoA) estimation in the cross-track dimension of an airborne pulsed ice-sounding synthetic aperture radar (SAR), formed by a non-linear array.…Read more on Direction of arrival assessment in airborne ice-sounding synthetic aperture radar
1 June, 2019 by Peter Convey
Due to its year-round accessibility and excellent on-site infrastructure, Kongsfjorden and the Ny-Ålesund Research and Monitoring Facility have become established as a primary location to study the impact of environmental…1 June, 2019 by Peter Convey
In this chapter, we review the available literature on the associations of invertebrates and fungi across the different environments of Antarctica, the diversity underlined by this type of association and…1 June, 2019 by Hugh Corr, Keith Nicholls
We describe an HF antenna design and implementation intended for ground penetrating radar applications in glaciology and hydrology. The HF antenna is based on modifications of a twin terminated folded…Read more on HF antenna prototype for geophysical ground penetrating radar
24 April, 2019 by Geraint Tarling
Hyperiid amphipods are predatory pelagic crustaceans that are particularly prevalent in high-latitude oceans. Many species are likely to have co-evolved with soft-bodied zooplankton groups such as salps and medusae, using…1 April, 2019 by Kelly Hogan
Understanding the sedimentary and geophysical archive of glaciated margins is a complex task that requires integration and analysis of disparate sedimentological and geophysical data. Their analysis is vital for understanding…Read more on Glaciated margins: the sedimentary and geophysical archive
23 March, 2019 by Claus-Dieter Hillenbrand, Kelly Hogan, Robert Larter
Trough mouth fans (TMFs) are sediment depocentres that form along high-latitude continental margins at the mouths of some cross-shelf troughs. They reflect the dynamics of past ice sheets over multiple…13 March, 2019 by Andrew Clarke, Lloyd Peck
This article briefly reviews the simple structure of polar marine food webs in the context of limited environmental temperature variability, but extreme seasonality of light, ice, and primary productivity. It…15 February, 2019 by Sandra McInnes, Sandra McInnes
30 January, 2019 by Kelly Hogan
A glaciated margin is a continental margin that has been occupied by a large ice mass, such that glacial processes and slope processes conspire to produce a thick sedimentary record.…Read more on An introduction to glaciated margins: the sedimentary and geophysical archive
29 January, 2019 by Kelly Hogan
Major glaciations or ‘ice ages’ are known to have affected the Earth's surface over the past three billion years. The best preserved records of these glaciations are often found in…1 January, 2019 by Chester Sands, David Barnes
As oceans warm, reducing the extent of sea-ice and-ice shelves, increased carbon capture by phytoplankton and storage by southern polar benthos (sea bed organisms), is potentially the largest negative feedback…Read more on Carbon storage by Kerguelen zoobenthos as a negative feedback on climate change.