Antarctic

An iceberg covering some 490 square miles has broken away from the Brunt Ice Shelf, only a few miles from the Halley British Antarctic Survey ice station. Though the calving of the giant iceberg was dramatic, it wasn't unexpected.

If you were a marine animal that just sat and waited for food to drift by, you might not choose to live in a place where little life is believed to exist. Nonetheless, such critters have recently been found deep beneath an Antarctic ice shelf.

An environmental disaster may have been averted as images from ESA's Copernicus fleet of satellites show the giant iceberg A-68a turning away from South Georgia Island and starting to break up into smaller bergs.

The giant iceberg A-68A that is threatening the island of South Georgia in the South Atlantic has split into three pieces and is thinning by one inch per day. If the bergs run aground they could cause considerable environmental damage.

The giant iceberg A-68a is likely to ground itself in the shallows of South Georgia island, so a scientific expedition is getting ready to visit the site to determine the impact of the event on the local ecology using underwater glider robots.

Brazil's original Antarctic research base, built in the 1980s, was destroyed in a blaze in 2012. Estúdio 41 has designed the Antarctic Station Comandante Ferraz to keep scientists safe in some of the most extreme conditions on the planet.

Satellite images indicate that an iceberg 158 km long and 48 km wide is floating towards the island of South Georgia in the southern Atlantic, where it could cause damage to the local wildlife, including penguins and seals, if it runs aground.

The cutting-edge polar research ship the RRS Sir David Attenborough – otherwise known as "Boaty McBoatface" – has finally set sail from its shipyard. It will now be put through trials before being officially handed over for service later this year.

A new genomic study has homed in on exactly when and where modern penguins originated, suggesting the birds first appeared in Australian and New Zealand waters about 22 million years ago before later spreading south into the cooler Antarctic waters.

A few years ago researchers discovered bacteria in Antarctica that could survive on nothing but air. Now the team has found evidence of this handy ability in other cold desert locations. The finding could have implications for life beyond Earth.

A team of scientists from the British Antarctic Survey has used satellite imagery of penguin poop captured by ESA's Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission to calculate there are 20 percent more emperor penguin colonies in Antarctica than previously thought.

Balloons may seem outdated, but for high-flying scientific instruments they’re making a comeback. NASA has now unveiled ASTHROS, a new infrared telescope that will be carried to the edge of space by a balloon the size of a football stadium.