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Regulation of wing or foot strokes in deep diving seabirds: a comparison between South Georgian Shag, Common Murre and Macaroni Penguin

1 January, 2010 by Philip Trathan

In the wild, seabirds dive longer than their theoretical aerobic dive limit (oxygen store divided by oxygen consumption rate). One of the potential explanations for this is that when descending…

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Linking predator and prey behaviour: contrasts between Antarctic fur seals and macaroni penguins at South Georgia

1 January, 2010 by Claire Waluda, Iain Staniland, Martin Collins, Philip Trathan

Antarctic fur seals Arctocephalus gazella and macaroni penguins Eudyptes chrysolophus are the two main land-based krill Euphausia superba consumers in the northern Scotia Sea. Using a combination of concurrent at-sea…

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Bringing home the trash: Do colony-based differences in foraging distribution lead to increased plastic ingestion in Laysan albatrosses?

28 October, 2009 by Vsevolod Afanasyev

When searching for prey, animals should maximize energetic gain, while minimizing energy expenditure by altering their movements relative to prey availability. However, with increasing amounts of marine debris, what once…

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From the eye of the albatrosses: A bird-borne camera shows an association between albatrosses and a killer whale in the Southern Ocean

1 October, 2009 by Philip Trathan

Albatrosses fly many hundreds of kilometers across the open ocean to find and feed upon their prey. Despite the growing number of studies concerning their foraging behaviour, relatively little is…

Read more on From the eye of the albatrosses: A bird-borne camera shows an association between albatrosses and a killer whale in the Southern Ocean

Three-dimensional diffusion simulation of outer radiation belt electrons during the 9 October 1990 magnetic storm

30 September, 2009 by Nigel Meredith, Richard Horne

Relativistic (>1 MeV) electron flux increases in the Earth's radiation belts are significantly underestimated by models that only include transport and loss processes, suggesting that some additional acceleration process is…

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Spatial distribution of average vorticity in the high-latitude ionosphere and its variation with interplanetary magnetic field direction and season

2 September, 2009 by Gareth Chisham, Mervyn Freeman

We present a technique to measure the magnetic field-aligned vorticity of meso-scale plasma flows in the F-region ionosphere using line-of-sight velocity measurements made by the Super Dual Auroral Radar Network…

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Spatial variation in seabed temperatures in the Southern Ocean: implications for benthic ecology and biogeography

1 September, 2009 by Andrew Clarke, David Barnes, Huw Griffiths, Michael Meredith, Susie Grant

The Antarctic seabed has traditionally been regarded as cold and thermally stable, with little spatial or seasonal variation in temperature. Here we demonstrate marked spatial variations in continental shelf seabed…

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Anatomy of a Dansgaard-Oeschger warming transition: High-resolution analysis of the North Greenland Ice Core Project ice core

27 April, 2009 by Eric Wolff, Liz Thomas, Robert Mulvaney

Large and abrupt temperature oscillations during the last glacial period, known as Dansgaard‐Oeschger (DO) events, are clearly observed in the Greenland ice core record. Here we present a new high‐resolution…

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Tracer-derived freshwater composition of the Siberian continental shelf and slope following the extreme Arctic summer of 2007

2 April, 2009 by Povl Abrahamsen, Michael Meredith

We investigate the freshwater composition of the shelf and slope of the Arctic Ocean north of the New Siberian Islands using geochemical tracer data (δ18O, Ba, and PO4*) collected following…

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Consistent generation of ice-streams via thermo-viscous instabilities modulated by membrane stresses

25 March, 2009 by Richard Hindmarsh, Richard Hindmarsh

Accurate computation of ice-stream location and dynamics is a key aspiration for theoretical glaciology. Ice-sheet models with thermo-viscous coupling have been shown to exhibit stream-like instabilities using shallow-ice approximation mechanics,…

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Diet, individual specialisation and breeding of brown skuas (Catharacta antarctica lonnbergi): An investigation using stable isotopes

1 January, 2009 by Richard Phillips

The diet of brown skuas (Catharacta antarctica lonnbergi) on Bird Island, South Georgia was assessed using a combination of stable isotope analysis (SIA) and mixing model techniques. We found evidence…

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The past is a guide to the future? Comparing Middle Pliocene vegetation with predicted biome distributions for the twenty-first century

1 January, 2009

During the Middle Pliocene, the Earth experienced greater global warmth compared with today, coupled with higher atmospheric CO2 concentrations. To determine the extent to which the Middle Pliocene can be…

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Isolation and characterization of macaroni penguin (Eudyptes chrysolophus) microsatellite loci and their utility in other penguin species (Spheniscidae, AVES)

1 January, 2009 by Philip Trathan

We report the characterization of 25 microsatellite loci isolated from the macaroni penguin (Eudyptes chrysolophus). Thirteen loci were arranged into four multiplex sets for future genetic studies of macaroni penguin…

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Nitrogen fixation in the western equatorial Pacific: Rates, diazotrophic cyanobacterial size class distribution, and biogeochemical significance

1 January, 2009 by Pierre Dutrieux

A combination of 15N2 labeling, Tyramide Signal Amplification–Fluorescent in Situ Hybridization (TSA-FISH) assay, and chemical analyses were performed along a trophic gradient (8000 km) in the equatorial Pacific. Nitrogen fixation…

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Where do penguins go during the inter-breeding period? Using geolocation to track their winter dispersion of the macaroni penguin

1 January, 2009 by Philip Trathan

Although penguins are key marine predators from the Southern Ocean, their migratory behaviour during the inter-nesting period remains widely unknown. Here, we report for the first time, to our knowledge,…

Read more on Where do penguins go during the inter-breeding period? Using geolocation to track their winter dispersion of the macaroni penguin

Movements, at-sea distribution and behaviour of a tropical pelagic seabird: the wedge-tailed shearwater in the western Indian Ocean

1 January, 2009 by Richard Phillips

This is the first study using geolocators (global location sensing, GLS) to track the movements of a pelagic tropical seabird. We used GLS to describe at-sea distribution and activity patterns…

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Triggers of the HSP70 stress response: environmental responses and laboratory manipulation in an Antarctic marine invertebrate (Nacella concinna)

1 January, 2009 by Lloyd Peck, Melody Clark

The Antarctic limpet, Nacella concinna, exhibits the classical heat shock response, with up-regulation of duplicated forms of the inducible heat shock protein 70 (HSP70) gene in response to experimental manipulation…

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Surviving the cold: molecular analyses of insect cryoprotective dehydration in the Arctic springtail Megaphorura arctica (Tullberg)

1 January, 2009 by Guy Hillyard, Michael Thorne, Roger Worland, Melody Clark

Background: Insects provide tractable models for enhancing our understanding of the physiological and cellular processes that enable survival at extreme low temperatures. They possess three main strategies to survive the…

Read more on Surviving the cold: molecular analyses of insect cryoprotective dehydration in the Arctic springtail Megaphorura arctica (Tullberg)

Remote sensing space weather events: Antarctic-Arctic radiation-belt (Dynamic) Deposition-VLF Atmospheric Research Konsortium network

1 January, 2009 by Mark Clilverd, Neil Cobbett

[1] The Antarctic-Arctic Radiation-belt (Dynamic) Deposition-VLF Atmospheric Research Konsortium (AARDDVARK) provides a network of continuous long-range observations of the lower ionosphere in the polar regions. Our ultimate aim is to…

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Environmental change and human impacts on terrestrial ecosystems of the sub-Antarctic islands between their discovery and the mid-twentieth century

1 January, 2009 by Peter Convey

Sub-Antarctic islands share many similarities in their history of human interaction and impacts before the mid-twentieth century. Large impacts on land were associated with marine exploitation industries of sealing and…

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Cenozoic climate history from seismic reflection and drilling studies on the Antarctic continental margin

1 January, 2009 by Robert Larter

Seismic stratigraphic studies and scientific drilling of the Antarctic continental margin have yielded clues to the evolution of Cenozoic climates, depositional paleoenvironments and paleoceanographic conditions. This paper draws on studies…

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A comparative study of endolithic microborings in basaltic lavas from a transitional subglacial – marine environment

1 January, 2009

Subglacially erupted Neogene basaltic hyaloclastites in lava-fed deltas in Antarctica were found to contain putative endolithic microborings preserved in fresh glass along hydrous alteration boundaries. The location and existence over…

Read more on A comparative study of endolithic microborings in basaltic lavas from a transitional subglacial – marine environment