Glaciers melting rapidly, fields of moss expanding, water streaming off ice shelves once frozen solid: these are just a few of the impacts of climate change observed by a team of 57 researchers during a 70-day voyage around the Antarctic coast on the Russian icebreaker Akademik Tryoshnikov. The expedition also revealed the presence of microplastics on the southern continent, and that the salinity of the Southern Ocean has decreased due to melting ice. The icebreaker Akademik Tryoshnikov. Image courtesy ICCE/Anderson Astor and Marcelo Curia. Antarctica is Earth’s fifth-largest continent and a key climate regulator. Together with the much smaller Arctic region, Antarctica redistributes the heat absorbed in the equatorial zone, balancing thermal energy. In other words, the ice masses in these two extreme locations of the planet are part of a huge circulatory machine that regulates energy, affecting the global climate. Led by Brazilian glaciologist Jefferson Cardia Simões, from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul’s Polar and Climate Center (CPC–UFRGS), the International Antarctic Coastal Circumnavigation Expedition (ICCE) took place in 2024. A total of 57 researchers from seven countries traveled 29,000 kilometers (about 18,000 miles), circling Antarctica and collecting snow, ice samples and seawater, to understand how the microbial life that inhabits this region is responding to climate change. An ice core collected for analysis. Image courtesy of ICCE/Anderson Astor and Marcelo Curia. The team drilled into the ice, collecting samples that will shed light on the nature of the atmosphere at different times in history, as well…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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