2024 Antarctic Voyage Shows Freshening Seas, Microplastics Everywhere, Penguin Chicks Dying In Rainstorms

[hatrack]

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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.

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The Antarctic and Amazon regions are linked by an atmospheric corridor, with cold air masses occasionally reaching the Brazilian state of Acre and the southern Amazon, causing temperatures to drop. At the same time, the “flying rivers” of water vapor rising up from the rainforest canopy can transport large volumes of moisture and even heat from the Amazon region as far south as Antarctica. On the 20th day of the expedition, the team observed a cyclone approaching the Mill Island region of East Antarctica.

“We saw that there was a heat wave in Brazil associated with a mass of hot, humid air coming from the Amazon, crossing the Atlantic and reaching Antarctica,” Schossler said, adding that this air mass contributed to the formation of the cyclone and rain, accelerating the melting of Antarctica’s sea ice. An increase in rainfall can have dire implications for animals not adapted to liquid precipitation. “Penguins are born with feathers that protect them from snow, not rain,” said polar biologist Emanuele Kuhn. “Therefore, if the chicks get wet in water at temperatures of 1 to 2°C [33.8-35.6° Fahrenheit], they suffer stress and die of hypothermia. They are animals adapted to snow.”

Given the connection between Antarctica and the Amazon, when there is deforestation and fires in the latter, the resultant haze, loaded with fine particles, reaches the former. “Air polluted by fires in the Amazon can carry black carbon — a highly heat-absorbing particle — to distant regions such as Antarctica,” Schossler said.

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https://news.mongabay.com/2025/06/microplastics-and-melting-ice-reveal-deepening-crisis-in-antarctica/

[FirstLight]

1. I sincerely hope that the planet can recover

Humans are a virus on the earth 😞 destroying ourselves will be good for her