The Latest Breaking News from Antarctic

Donna Urquhart takes 26 days to break the endurance record in some of the harshest conditions on Earth

When I was working on my book Antarctica in Fiction, friends and colleagues would joke about what an easy task I had taken on. How many writers would choose to set a novel in a continent with no permanent human population? Surely a dozen or so books would cover it.

Current outbreak, which started in 2021, is estimated to have killed millions of wild birds and thousands of mammals globally

Study after study showed the breakdown of climate systems taking place much earlier than foreseen, with potentially catastrophic results

Captain Harpreet Chandi already broke two Guinness World Records for polar exploration last year but now claims she has a third

We don’t want to give you the wrong idea: things are bad. Antarctic ice sheets are melting, the fossil fuel lobby was everywhere at the COP talks, and even solutions like electric cars have their problems. And that just covers the past few weeks of this newsletter.

Antarctica is often imagined as the last untouched wilderness. Unfortunately, avian influenza (“bird flu”) is encroaching on the icy continent. The virus has already reached the sub-Antarctic islands between the Antarctic Peninsula and South America. It’s only a matter of time before it reaches the Antarctic continent.

If we want to understand the future, it’s often useful to look at the past. And even more useful if you use octopus DNA to peer into worlds long gone.

Scientists investigating how Antarctica's ice sheets retreated in the deep past have turned to an innovative approach: studying the genes of octopuses that live in its chilly waters.