After two decades of hardwork, on 5 February 2012, a team of Russian scientists began drilling at Lake Vostok, the largest of more than 140 sub-glacial lakes and the most deeply buried of the lakes hidden under the Antarctic ice cap.

A huge swath of the waters off Antarctica must be protected from fishing and other industries, environmental groups said on Monday.

More than 40% of the region needs to be given protection before one of the world's last true frontier areas is damaged irreparably by human activity, the Antarctic Ocean Alliance (AOA) said.

Using satellite laser altimetry, basal melting of ice shelves is determined to be the main driver of Antarctic ice-sheet loss, with changing climate the likely cause.

Massive extraction of groundwater can resolve a puzzle over a rise in sea levels in past decades, scientists in Japan said on Sunday.

Global sea levels rose by an average of 1.8 millimetres per year from 1961-2003, according to data from tide gauges.

But the big question is how much of this can be pinned to global warming.

Of the West Antarctic ice shelves, those in the Amundsen Sea sector have given the most cause for concern. Ocean modelling of the Weddell Sea region, together with a detailed survey of the ice bed morphology, indicates that this region, too, may change soon.

Scientists are predicting the disappearance of another vast ice shelf in Antarctica by the end of the century that will accelerate rising sea levels.

The Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf fringing the Weddell Sea on the eastern side of Antarctica has so far not seen ice loss from global warming and much of the observation of melting has focused on the western side of the continent around the Amundsen Sea. But new research from the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Germany says the 450,000-sq-km ice shelf is under threat.

The redirection of warm water under the Filchner–Ronne Ice Shelf during the second half of this century could cause the ice-shelf base to melt at a rate 20 times higher than at present.

A reconstruction of global surface temperature is used to show that deglacial temperature is correlated with and generally lags carbon dioxide concentration, a result that contributes to the explanation of the temperature change that occurred at the end of the most recent ice age.

A reconstruction of temperature from proxy records shows that the rise in global mean temperature closely resembled, but slightly lagged, the rise in carbon dioxide concentration during the last period of deglaciation.

Says little data available on impact of global warming on these
Dharamsala: The Indian Government should create a cadre of glaciologists to study the impact of global warming on Himalayan glaciers. At present little data is available regarding the impact of global warming on the Himalayan glaciers.

Sridhar Ananda Krishnan, Professor of environment science at Pennsylvania State University in the USA, stated this while talking to The Tribune. He was here to deliver a lecture on environment science to students of the Central University of Himachal Pradesh at Dharamsala.

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