The first Australian map of the entire Antarctica has become part of the National Archives collection.

For the first time paleontologists have found fossilized burrows of tetrapods – any land vertebrates with four legs or leglike appendages – in Antarctica dating from the Early Triassic epoch, about 245 million years ago.

Computer analyses of global climate have consistently overstated warming in Antarctica, concludes new research by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and Ohio State University. The study can help scientists improve computer models and determine if Earth's southernmost continent will warm significantly this century, a major research question because of Antarctica's potential impact on global sea-level rise.

Scientists at British Antarctic Survey (BAS) in collaboration with the Technical University of Braunschweig (TUBS), Germany have completed the first ever series of flights by autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in Antarctica. This is the first time that unpiloted UAVs have been used in the Antarctic and the successful flights open up a major new technique for gathering scientific data in the harshest and remotest environment on Earth.

“Antarctica is the ultimate destination for anyone interested in natural history but it also challenges those people who visit to think broadly about our responsibilities to all life on Earth.”

Scientists say they have taken an array of new marine species from the seabed off eastern Antarctica. They are warning, though, that climate change could soon make extinct many of the strange creatures they have just discovered. From Sydney, Phil Mercer reports.

“Antarctica is the ultimate destination for anyone interested in natural history but it also challenges those people who visit to think broadly about our responsibilities to all life on Earth.” That's the view of Dr Robert Lambert, a lecturer on Tourism and the Environment at The University of Nottingham, who has just returned from the Antarctic in his role as an Observer for the International Association of Antarctica Tour Operators (IAATO).

Frozen in time… frozen in place… frozen solid… All of these phrases have been used to describe Antarctica, and yet they all belie the truth about this southerly point on the globe. Although the area is covered in ice and bears witness to some of the most extreme cold on the planet, this ecosystem is dynamic, not static, and change here has always been dramatic and intense.

A team of scientists representing six international institutions, including Texas A&M University, has succeeded in reaching the summit of Antarctica – also a monumental achievement for ground-based astronomy -- to establish a new astronomical observatory at Dome Argus on the highest point of the Antarctic Plateau.

Tomiyasu Ishikawa climbed to the top of Vinson Massif becoming the oldest Japanese to scale the highest peaks on all seven continents, which have been dubbed the Seven Summits reports The Yomiuri Shimbun.

After enduring months on the coldest, driest, and windiest continent on Earth, researchers today closed out the inaugural season on an unprecedented, multi-year effort to retrieve the most detailed record of greenhouse gases in Earth’s atmosphere over the last 100,000 years.

The first evidence of a volcanic eruption from beneath Antarctica’s most rapidly changing ice sheet is reported this week in the journal Nature Geosciences. The volcano on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet erupted 2000 years ago (325BC) and remains active.