New studies investigating the ice found at the planet’s polar regions are reporting that a precarious situation appears to be unfolding at the ends of the Earth, with the increased melting of both sea and glacial ice in the Arctic Ocean, Greenland, and even the supposedly-stable glaciers of East Antarctica.
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Researchers in Antarctica have discovered that the frozen continent’s ice shelves produce an audible sound when the wind passes over the surface snow, a haunting song from a landscape that remains alien to the majority of us. The researchers also found that the "song" changes as the surface conditions of the ice changes — meaning that this Antarctica aria might become useful in tracking the effects of climate change on the ice at the bottom of the Earth.
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A recent large-scale survey of Antarctica’s ice sheets has revealed that the rate of ice melt from the (mostly) frozen southern continent has tripled over the last decade, releasing volumes of water into the ocean on par with the freshwater flow from Greenland. Increasing temperatures from the air above and the ocean below has accelerated the melting of the ice shelves in West Antarctica, and overall ice sheet growth in East Antarctica has slowed. Additionally, the loss of ice mass in the south means that sea level rise will be more pronounced in the north, spelling trouble for populations living in coastal areas, including those of the United States.
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A massive hole the size of Lake Superior has opened in the ice that covers Antarctica’s Weddell Sea, a phenomenon that hasn’t been seen since the mid-1970s. This hole, called a polynya, opens up 80,000 square kilometers (31,000 square miles) of ocean in the middle of the Weddell Sea’s ice pack, hundreds of miles from shore. "This is hundreds of kilometers from the ice edge. If we didn’t have a satellite, we wouldn’t know it was there," explains professor Kent Moore, an atmospheric physicist at the University of Toronto.
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