Antarctica is made up of two major regions - East and West Antarctica - naturally separated by the 3,000 km-long Transarctic Mountains. East Antarctica is comprised of a 10 million square-kilometre ice dome. West Antarctica is lower and smaller representing a fifth of the continent’s land area with the Antarctic Peninsula accounting for a further 2%. The ice sheet flows down to the ocean to form ice shelves, floating platforms of ice with a cumulated surface area of 1.5 million km2. These ice shelves in turn flow and break up, calving tabular icebergs. Monitoring climate changeGlobal warming is causing higher melting speeds and increasing snow falls in Antarctica. Findings from studies differ regarding the scope of the phenomenon, but suggest that the ice in Antarctica is retreating. In January 2008, NASA announced that 190 billion tons of ice were lost in 2006, mainly in West Antarctica, a region which appears more vu...
17/05/2013
Shrinking glaciers behind a third of sea-level rise: study
15/04/2013
Antarctic summer ice melting 10 times faster: study
12/04/2013
UN court to hear Australia bid to halt Japan whaling
David Fahey
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Designed to recognize grassroots environmental heroes, the Goldman Environmental Prize, founded by Richard and Rhoda Goldman in 1989 In San Francisco, is awarded annually to individuals from the six inhabited continental regions for sustained and significant efforts to...
The famous French designer Philippe Starck has just created (May 2008) six domestic wind turbines which cost...
National biodiversity index Threatened ecosystems
