The Antarctic bathydraconid dragonfish, Parachaenichthys charcoti, is an Antarctic notothenioid teleost endemic to the Southern Ocean. The Southern Ocean has cooled to -1.8ºC over the past 30 million years, and the seawater had retained this cold temperature and isolated oceanic environment because of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current. Notothenioids dominate Antarctic fish, making up 90% of the...

Understanding the role of atmospheric CO2 during past climate changes requires clear knowledge of how it varies in time relative to temperature. Antarctic ice cores preserve highly resolved records of atmospheric CO2 and Antarctic temperature for the past 800,000 years. Here we propose a revised relative age scale for the concentration of atmospheric CO2 and Antarctic temperature for the last d...

Functioning of terrestrial ecosystems of the Maritime Antarctic in a warmer climate Printing: PrintPartners Ipskamp B.V. 1 General introduction 2 External nutrient inputs into terrestrial ecosystems of the Falkland Islands and the Maritime Antarctic region 3 Food choice of Antarctic soil arthropods clarified by stable isotope signatures. 4 The effect of environmental change on soil arthropod co...

The Princess Elizabeth Land sector of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet is a significant reservoir grounded ice and adjacent to regions that experienced great change during Quaternary glacial cycles Pliocene warm episodes. existence an extensive subglacial water system in (to date only inferred from satellite imagery) bears potential significantly impact thermal kinematic conditions overlying sheet....

The bacterioplankton assemblage in Crater Lake, Oregon (U.S.A.), is different from communities found in other oxygenated lakes, as demonstrated by four small subunit ribosomal ribonucleic acid (SSU rRNA) gene clone libraries and oligonucleotide probe hybridization to RNA from lake water. Populations in the euphotic zone of this deep (589 m), oligotrophic caldera lake are dominated by two phylog...

Sub-Antarctic land is a rare resource in world terms. It is appropriate to recognise the sub-Antarctic as a region distinct from the cool temperate zone to its north and the Antarctic zone to its south, a region with its own characteristics, and with significant intrinsic value and scientific importance. Appropriate protection from anthropogenic change and exploitation must be ensured for the s...

In recent decades, an increasing number of people have traveled to sub-Antarctic and Antarctic regions each year for research, tourism, and resource exploitation. Hunting of Antarctic fur seals (Arctocephalus gazella) almost pushed the species to extinction in the early 1900s, but populations have since shown rapid and substantial recovery. The species' range has re-expanded to include several ...

Open-ocean environments provide few obvious barriers to the dispersal of marine organisms. Major currents and/or environmental gradients potentially impede gene flow. One system hypothesized to form an open-ocean dispersal barrier is the Antarctic Polar Front, an area characterized by marked temperature change, deep water, and the high-flow Antarctic Circumpolar current. Despite these potential...

[1] A bipolar seesaw of Arctic and Antarctic temperature anomalies has been reported to be evident in instrumental data on decadal timescales during the last century. This finding hinges upon a global temperature data set that for the area poleward of 60 S is derived from only one subAntarctic station prior to the mid-1940s, and does not include a substantial number of Antarctic stations until ...

The ENDURANCE autonomous underwater vehicle was developed and deployed to explore and map a unique environment: the waters of Lake Bonney in Taylor Valley, one of the McMurdo Dry Valleys of Antarctica. This permanently ice-covered lake presented several unique challenges and opportunities for exploration and mapping with an AUV. ENDURANCE was successfully deployed in 2008 and 2009, completing t...