Geobulletin alpha

Free Resource Alert! New Antarctic eBook 

Where do Antarctic icerbergs come from and how do they form? What can scientists learn by studying the rocks and... Read more

Finding Fossils: A Biostratigraphy Activity 

This new activity, developed by Dr. Anieke Brombacher, aims to show how we determine the age of a sediment sample... Read more

New Educational Resource! 

Check out our brand new educational resource! Author, illustrator, deep-sea diver, polar explorer, and recent Outreach Officer on the JOIDES... Read more

Career Spotlight: Micropaleontologist Anieke Brombacher 

Anieke Brombacher Interview   Please describe your job duties while on the JR. What will you be doing on a... Read more

Career Spotlight: Micropaleontologist Elisa Malinverno 

Elisa Malinverno Interview   Please describe your job duties while on the JR. What will you be doing on a... Read more

Friday fold: Gold Harbour, South Georgia 

Near Antarctica, South Georgia Island is a good place to find glaciers and penguins. And, as it turns out: massive recumbent folds! Let's take a look. The post Friday fold: Gold Harbour, South Georgia appeared first on Mountain Beltway.

New Specimen of Prolacerta broomi from the Early Triassic of Antarctica 

Spiekman, S. N. F. 2018. A new specimen of Prolacerta broomi from the lower Fremouw Formation (Early Triassic) of Antarctica, its biogeographical implications and a taxonomic revision. Scientific Reports 8, Article number: 17996. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-36499-6 Abstract - Prolacerta broomi is an Early Triassic archosauromorph of particular importance to the early

Antarctica and Fossils 

In which the blogger finds his world insisting, though a campaign involving press reports, a new museum exhibit, and postage stamps, that he pay attention to Antarctic fossils.Perhaps I’m just experiencing that phenomenon where something comes to my attention and suddenly my world appears overpopulated with that something.  It seems that there is increasing attention among scientists and in the popular media to fossils from Antarctica.  Frankly, it’s not hard to see why collecting and [...]

The Sixth Extinction: A Sigma Force Novel, by James Rollins 

I did a double-take in the library last week. I was scanning the shelves of audio books, looking for something interesting, when I saw one called The Sixth Extinction. Ahh, such a good book – Elizabeth Kolbert did such a great job with – WAIT – This one has “James Rollins” listed as the author. It wasn’t Kolbert’s book. It was a different The Sixth Extinction. The full title is The

Earth's Magnetism in Antarctica 

A blog post by Tanja Petersen and Neville Palmer from their recent GNS Science trip to Antarctica to measure the Earth's Magnetic Field.It took 8 hours for the Hercules aircraft to fly from Christchurch to Williams airfield, a runway on the Ross ice shelf close to Scott Base. Both of us had never been to Antarctica before; we had a big smile on our faces when we stepped out from the airplane onto the ice being greeted by dry crisp cold air and what seemed like a never ending blanket of snow.  [...]

Three GigaPans from Heard Island 

The 2016 Heard Island expedition has returned. They took a GigaPan rig with them. Explore new imagery from this remote and hostile

As The Science Gets Better, The News Gets Worse on Sea Level Rise 

I spent the weekend reading the new paper in Nature last week that made a lot of news. (Justin Gillis at The NY Times has an excellent summary of the paper here). If you missed it, the short version is that for the first time, researchers used a series of coupled models to produce a more realistic look at what will happen to Antarctica in the coming decades and centuries. There

Drake Passage, Take 2 

We have almost completed our north-bound crossing of the Drake Passage. It was much easier than our first crossing a month ago when we were heading south! The Drake Passage is the body of water between the southern tip of South America (called Cape Horn) and the northern tip of Antarctica (essentially, at our northern-most sampling sites). To remind you of the geography here: The southern tip of South America is a large island called Tierra del Fuego. The Strait of Magellan passes between [...]

Back at Palmer Station 

We traveled to Cape Evensen, which is an extra site that we added to our trip. Because we were so far ahead of schedule, we got permission to go even farther south to sample in a small gap in our overall gradient. Cape Evensen is at 66°S, so just below the Antarctic Circle.The weather was nice enough while we were there. Since it had snowed the day before, though, we found that it was difficult to find any sampling sites. We saw moss in several locations, but not in large enough patches to [...]

Seals galore 

Our research is about soil and the microscopic organisms living in it, but we also get to see a lot of bigger animals that live in Antarctica. We’ve seen whales, dolphins, seals, and lots of different birds. We’ve seen a few different species of seal, but mostly elephant seals and fur seals. Anyone who followed my blog last year knows all about elephant seals, because there are a LOT of them at Rothera Station. This is the first year I’ve worked around a lot of fur seals. Fur seals are [...]

Data Recovery 

We finally made it through the Drake Passage! It was a rough ride, so I’m glad it’s over. Today, we were helping out another project. Over a year ago, a group of scientists dropped moorings into the ocean to measure sea temperature. They are concerned that temperature change will allow an invasive crab to move into Antarctica from the deep ocean. The crab could have a BIG impact, because it would be a new predator in the ecosystem! The deep ocean crab hasn’t been able to live in [...]

Under Way 

We are at sea!Yesterday, we stowed all of our gear on board our ship, the Laurence M. Gould (or LMG for short). This will be our home for the next month! Here is the LMG in port at Punta Arenas. You can see the crane towards the back working hard, unloading the gear from the previous research project and loading gear for ours:The LMG is named after Laurence McKinley Gould, an early polar scientist and geologist. He came to Antarctica on Admiral Byrd’s famous first expedition. He died in 1995 [...]

Get ready... Get set... 

It’s almost time to start our next field season! Our field season begins when we fly south on February 18. That’s just a couple of weeks away!This year, we will complete our “latitudinal gradient” along the Antarctic Peninsula. For this project, we are exploring the diversity of soil biological communities along the entire Antarctic Peninsula. We will discover what species live in all of the places we visit. We will also compare who lives at each site with the plants and soil chemistry [...]

South Georgia Island and Farewell to the Deep South 

The two voyages have come to an end and only South Georgia is left to report on. After four glorious weeks of sunshine in Antarctica, we were bound to pay the price with rain and snow. Oh well, some good shots were had anyway in this sub-Antarctic paradise.Our first stop was at Grytviken, the former headquarters of the whaling operations that were undertaken here in the early 20th century. The former managers house has been turned in to a bang-up museum shown here.Whale bones litter the [...]

Study finds high melt rates on Antarctica’s most stable ice shelf 

A new study measured a melting rate that is 25 times higher than expected on one part of the Ross Ice Shelf. The study suggests that high, localized melt rates such as this one on Antarctica’s largest and most stable ice shelf are normal and keep Antarctica’s ice sheets in