geekosystem

High concentrations of boron have been found in an antarctic meteorite of Martian origin by a team of researchers from the University of Hawaii at Manoa NASA Astrobiology Institute. That's actually a lot more exciting than it sounds since boron was a pretty key ingredient to early life. Though they didn't show evidence of life itself, the findings could further indicate that life may have once been possible on Mars.

We were all of the mind that humanity had basically done all the mapmaking it was going to do back when the King of Portugal was still footing the bill, but apparently cartography is alive and well as a field of study! Won't Buster Bluth be pleased? Well, probably not, because he'd probably hard a hard time keeping up with the scientists at the British Antarctic Survey, who have expanded upon and improved their datasets of the topographical map of Antarctica to create a brand new set of images that they've been calling Bedmap2. If the blue part is the land, what will he think of the white part?

Russian researchers working on samples from Lake Vostok -- a subglacial lake in Antarctica sealed away for eons by more than two miles of ice -- say they have found signs of a wholly new kind of bacterial life in water samples taken from the lake. It's a pretty impressive claim, if true, and one could quiet concerns raised late last year the lake may have been entirely devoid of life -- not to mention meaning new chapters in microbiology textbooks. Now we just have to wait and see if this bold announcement holds water.

A team of European penguin researchers found some unexpected results when they turned infrared heat sensing cameras on a group of emperor penguins they were studying. The outer layer of the birds feathers, they found, was actually colder than the surrounding air. While it goes against common sense, keeping their outermost layers ice-cold may actually help penguins stay warm deeper inside -- where it counts.

People become scientists for a lot of reasons. Because they enjoy solving the mysteries of the universe, or want to make the world a better place to live, or just because it's a career that helps them finish the death ray they're working on in their basement. These are all noble reasons for wanting to do science -- especially the death ray thing -- but none of them is the best reason. The best reason to become a scientist, clearly, is so you can strap small cameras to Adelie penguins and make videos about their lives under the sea like the one you can watch below.

After years of failure, a team of Russian researchers and engineers working in Antarctica have succeeded in taking a clean sample of water from Lake Vostok, a liquid water lake sealed beneath two miles of ice sheets at the bottom of the world. Scientists hope that this first untainted sample of the water -- which has been largely untouched by the outside world since prehistory -- will provide them with new insights into some of Earth's earliest lifeforms.

Here's a new one for our ever growing file of stories labelled "idiots doing idiot things because they're idiots" -- an Australian professional adventurer is hoping to recreate the last leg of polar explorer and mind-blowing badass Ernest Shackleton's ill-fated expedition to cross Antarctica by land. That's not the crossing of Antarctica that the expedition was meant to be, but the grueling fight for survival against all odds it turned into. After all, we assume the way you get to be an Australian professional adventurer is by accepting dumb bets in bars and then endangering people's lives needlessly carrying them out.

Earlier this year, a team of Russian-led engineers and researchers drilled a hole into the Earth, breaking into Lake Vostok, a liquid water lake sealed beneath the ice of Antarctica for nearly 15 million years. They were looking for signs of life in the lake -- microbes that might offer clues to what sort of creatures we could expect to run into on icy moons elsewhere in the solar system, like Saturn's satellite Europa. This week, the first analyses of water samples from the lake are in, and they're pretty disheartening. Lake Vostok appears to be devoid of microbial life.

Lissarca miliaris is not exactly a glamorous or remarkable creature. The small, dull, clam-like creatures are filter feeders living a typically less than exciting life beneath the cold waves and icy sheets of Antarctica. The tiny mollusk is getting some time in the spotlight, though, as it was just revealed to have one of the stranger life cycles known to science. All specimens of Lissarca miliaris are born males. As they age and grow, though, they develop female sexual organs, transitioning to a fully female form capable of bearing young by the end of their lifespan.

A new study of Antarctic ice suggests that the continent may be harboring enormous stores of methane just beneath surface layers of ice. Okay, has everybody made their fart jokes? Good. Moving on. The main ingredient of natural gas and a common byproduct of digestion in everything from cows to people to microorganisms, methane is the among the big bads of the greenhouse gas world. It's super effective at trapping heat, trapping more than 20 times as much heat in the atmosphere than its more well-known cousin, carbon dioxide. Research published in the journal Nature suggests that there are more than 4 billion metric tons of methane underneath Antarctica's ice sheets. If that ice melts, releasing the methane stored underneath, the resulting gasses could contribute significantly to climate change. It's like the rich getting richer, only with instead of money, you have a greenhouse gas, and instead of investing wisely, everything melts.

Climate change is a thing that happens. The current argument, though, isn't really about whether it happens, but whether humans, as a species, are causing it to happen faster than it naturally would occur. Antarctica, for example, wasn't always covered in ice. It was once a bustling landmass like any other. Scientists drilling on the edge of the continent have now discovered proof that it even had palm trees once upon a time.

The West Antarctic Ice Sheet is losing ice faster than any other part of Antarctica. Some of those glaciers it's composed of are shrinking by more than a meter per year and scientists aren't exactly sure why. We are, however, now closer to discovering the reason as experts from the University of Aberdeen and British Antarctic Survey have discovered a hidden rift valley beneath the Ferrigno Ice Stream which, in places, is a mile deeper than its surroundings.

Despite Google bringing the South Pole to your computer, there are some sights that have to be witnessed first hand to really be appreciated. Such is likely the case for this picture, taken outside the Concordia base in Antarctica. In the bitter, freezing night, the southern lights -- aurora australis -- put on an incredible show with the Milky Way.

Google could already take you to some pretty amazing places with Google Maps, but their World Wonders project has upped the ante with remarkable locations from across the globe accessible to anyone with an Internet connection. Now Antarctica, once considered the last frontier, can be wandered with street view. But more importantly: There are penguins.

After twenty years and 2.2 miles of drilling, a Russian scientific team has reported that they have breached the ice cap above Lake Vostok some 3,768 meters beneath Antarctica. Though many had theorized the existence of lakes beneath the antarctic ice since the 19th century, conclusive proof of one did not exist until 1993 when satellite data confirmed that an ancient fresh water lake did indeed exist. Untouched for nearly 15 million years, breaching Lake Vostok could have wide ranging effects on our understanding of life itself.