www.AntarcticGuide.com
11 February 2012
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16980747

Falkland Islands: A shortage of eggs
By Allan Little
BBC News, Falkland Islands

The presence of Prince William on RAF duty on the Falkland Islands has escalated tensions between the UK and Argentina in recent weeks. But for the islanders, the new trade restrictions are their most pressing concern.

“Have you been hit, sir?” I was asked as I was ushered into the drawing room of Government House on the seafront in Stanley. “Have you been hit by the egg shortage?”

And I thought, yes, although I hadn’t realised it until this moment, I had indeed been hit by the egg shortage.

The drawing room of Government House is a splendid Victorian space and as you take your seat, all the British monarchs who have reigned since the islands became British look down at you from their magnificent framed portraits.

Queen Victoria, Edward VII and his Danish queen, Alexandra. George V and Queen Mary. Even, surprisingly, Edward VIII, then George VI and Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II.

On the mantelpiece is a silver cigarette case presented, in 1933, to the then governor of the islands to mark the 100th anniversary of British sovereignty.

Everywhere you go, you are reminded of how deep the roots of Britishness go. Falkland Islanders will slip into conversation, early in your encounter, their generation count.

“I’m seventh generation,” one sheep farmer told me. “My grandchildren are ninth generation Falkland Islanders.”

He was one of many who made the same claim to belonging, authentically and indisputably, to this little outcrop of British identity in the windblown South Atlantic.

“Yes,” I said. “As a matter of fact, I have been hit by the egg shortage.” For at breakfast that morning, I had nonchalantly ordered two poached eggs on toast.

It was one of those moments when you realise that, as an outsider, you have failed to pick up on a matter of local custom and have momentarily caused embarrassment to your hosts.

“Two eggs, sir?” the lady said. “I’m afraid that won’t be possible. We are down to one egg apiece now.”

The 2,500 people who live here are among the most isolated in the world and are getting more so.

The editor of the local newspaper, whimsically called Penguin News, wrote in her editorial this week about being asked again and again by visiting journalists to express the islanders’ excitement about the presence here of Prince William, on a six-week tour of duty as a helicopter pilot.

She described instead a call she had received from a friend who was bubbling over with joy not because of Prince William – and all that his stay here symbolised about the all-important bond between these islands and Britain – but because she managed to grow a pepper and a cucumber.

Like eggs, fresh vegetables are increasingly hard to come by. The islands – acre for acre – aren’t much smaller than Wales, but the land is rocky and unyielding.

You can drive for mile after mile across peaty moorlands of black and pale yellow. There are no trees, for wind comes in at you with such a force from the cold Atlantic that nothing stands a chance. I visited a sheep farm – 19,000 acres to sustain 2,500 sheep.

In other words, each individual sheep needs seven acres of land to get through the year. That’s how ungiving this land is. And yet the Falkland Islanders make it work.

But you can’t get eggs and you can’t get vegetables. South America once traded happily with the islanders, supplying all their needs. But Buenos Aires has been working hard to cut the islands off.

Recently, Argentina persuaded other South American countries to turn Falklands-flagged vessels away from their ports. Ships rounding Cape Horn heading for the Falklands are routinely stopped, searched and delayed, so much so that merchant vessels have largely given up trying.

Argentina has also restricted air traffic. There is one flight a week from Chile. Argentina won’t allow more than this to pass through its airspace. Now Argentina is threatening to close even this last link with mainland South America.

But they are an unflappable lot, the Falkland Islanders. They keep calm and carry on.

They also seem strikingly egalitarian, unimpressed by status or rank. Ask them about Prince William and they will say they are glad he is here, but that he’s here to do a job and so are a lot of other young servicemen and women whose names you don’t know and we are just as glad they’re here.

The editor of Penguin News – combining the two big stories of the prince and the fresh produce shortage – was in no doubt which she considered more germane to the life and wellbeing of the islanders.

“Were I to obtain an interview with the dashing young royal,” she wrote, “my first question might well be – did you bring any bananas?”

Antarctic Guide
info@antarcticguide.com
www.AntarcticGuide.com
Twitter: AntarcticGuide

www.AntarcticGuide.com

Falklands risks fresh spat with Argentina as nation seeks to get its own passports
By IAN DRURY

The Falkland Islands is opening talks with the Government about getting its own passport – risking a fresh spat with Argentina.
Officials representing the territory in London are to speak to the Home Office about the possibility of customising the travel document so that the words ‘Falkland Islands’ appear on the front cover.
The idea, which has popular support among the islands’ 3,000 citizens, is intended to reflect their pride at living in the Falklands while reinforcing their links to the UK.

The move would send a clear message to Argentina that the population has no wish to give up British sovereignty.
The government in Buenos Aires has been ratcheting up tensions over the islands’ future ahead of the 30th anniversary of the Falklands War, when invading Argentine forces were driven out of the archipelago. The two-month conflict cost 255 British and 649 Argentine lives.

The Falkland Islands is eager to reinforce its relationship with Britain by asking for the name to be included on passports that are handed out to its citizens.
Dick Sawle, a member of the islands’ legislative assembly, is pushing for it to be embossed in gold lettering on the maroon passport cover below the words ‘United Kingdom Of Great Britain And Northern Ireland’ and on the information page.
This would bring the Falkland Islands into line with Gibraltar, another British overseas territory, which is allowed to print its name on the front cover of its UK passport. However, these are handed out by the Gibraltan authorities.

Around 30 people from the Falkland Islands apply for passports each year, which are issued in London. Officials are investigating whether a batch of blank documents could be stamped with the words ‘Falkland Islands’ and handed to those who request them.
Mr Sawle said: ‘This is certainly not about any form of independence from Britain. We want to remain British. But it is about being proud of the islands that we live in. It is a very small thing but it has a lot of support in the Falklands.’
Falkland Islands’ residents were granted full UK citizenship under the British Nationality (Falkland Islands) Act 1983, a year after the war.
However, sources suggested the Home Office might consider it too expensive to invest in the specialised passport-making machinery required to give the Falklands its own passport cover.
The move was revealed after the diplomatic row over the Falklands deepened when Argentina complained to the United Nations on Friday that Britain was ‘militarising’ the islands.
The Ministry of Defence is sending state-of-the-art Type 45 destroyer HMS Dauntless to patrol the South Atlantic and Prince William is on the islands as a RAF search-and-rescue helicopter pilot. Both deployments are ‘routine’, insist defence chiefs.
Argentine foreign minister Hector Timerman’s claims to the UN that the UK was increasing its military presence was branded ‘absurd’ by British diplomats.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2100793/Falklands-nation-seeks-passports.html#ixzz1mKRdOxX1

Antarctic Guide
info@antarcticguide.com
www.AntarcticGuide.com
Twitter: AntarcticGuide

www.AntarcticGuide.com

http://www.alaskadispatch.com/article/alaska-glaciers-losing-46-billion-tons-ice-each-year?page=full

Alaska glaciers losing 46 billion tons of ice each year
Doug O’Harra | Feb 12, 2012

Alaska glaciers have been shedding about 46 billion tons of ice each year, making America’s Arctic state the world’s single biggest contributor to glacier-fed sea level rise outside of Greenland or Antarctica, say new estimates published this week in the online edition of the journal of Nature.

Still, Alaska remains a wee player in the global ice frappe, producing only about 8.5 percent of the world’s annual glacier shrinkage of 526 billion tons, according to the study, led by a team at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

The total mass ice loss from Greenland, Antarctica combined with all of Earth’s other glaciers and ice caps amounted to about 1,000 cubic miles — about eight times the water volume of Lake Erie, explained UC-Boulder physicist John Wahr in this story about the work.

“The total amount of ice lost to Earth’s oceans from 2003 to 2010 would cover the entire United States in about 1 and one-half feet of water,” added Wahr, a fellow at the CU-headquartered Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences.

Most of Alaska’s annual ice loss occurs in the snow-bound coastal ranges that crown the Gulf of Alaska, and it’s a huge chunk — contributing about one third of the 150 billion tons of total annual ice loss from 18 regions around the globe outside of the two much larger continental sources.

Southern Alaskans take note: we are seasonal witnesses to this process. The inexorable retreat of Portage Glacier from view at Portage Lake, and other shrinkage by ice tongues in Anchorage’s Chugach State Park, have all made tiny-but measurable-additions to this overall glacier breakdown.

Only shrinkage by the glaciers on Baffin Island (about 35 billion tons) and the Ellesmere Island area (about 34 billion tons) rival the Alaskan retreat, the study reported.

Still, size matters. The loss of ice from Alaska and the Canadian Arctic remains small when compared to the losses seen in the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica. Between 2003 and 2010, the continental ice sheets on Greenland dumped 222 billion tons annually, while Antarctica lost 165 billion tons.

Measuring gravity with eyes in the skies
To get the totals, the researchers basically resorted to rocket science, using data gathered by the tandem satellites of the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment, or GRACE, a joint effort of NASA and Germany.

Launched in 2002, the GRACE satellites zip around Earth 16 times each day in a 300-mile-high orbit, traveling about 135 miles apart. They dial in tiny changes in the Earth’s gravitational pull and keep track of any shifts in the planet’s mass caused by melting ice. These ultra-precise measurements have been producing gravity maps about 1,000 times more accurate than previous efforts. For more detail, here is a primer on how GRACE works and the latest fix on its orbit around the globe.

The current study used the satellites to estimate the “mass balance” of the world’s glaciers — the difference between the melt of summer and the growth from snow accumulation during winter. Finding a glacier’s mass balance is critical to gauging its health — whether it’s growing or shriveling up — but can take weeks or months of dangerous, expensive field work spread over many seasons. Only a small fraction of the world’s glaciers have been studied on the ground.

“This is the first time anyone has looked at all of the mass loss from all of Earth’s glaciers and ice caps with GRACE,” Wahr explained here. “The Earth is losing an incredible amount of ice to the oceans annually, and these new results will help us answer important questions in terms of both sea rise and how the planet’s cold regions are responding to global change.”

The United Nations Climate Panel has published estimates that sea global sea level will ultimately rise between 7 inches and almost two feet by 2090, the Christian Science Monitor reported in a story about the study. “But those numbers do not include melting from polar regions where the vast majority of the world’s freshwater is locked away.”

Melt all of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets, and ocean levels might rise as much as 200 feet. Using GRACE gave scientists a method to find out what had really happened over the past decade and zero in on hard-to-study glaciers and refine all of the estimates for sea level rise, Wahr said.

Too many glaciers, too little time, too much ice-cold melt
“There are simply too many glaciers, and most of them too remote to access, to be able to monitor all of them from the ground. There are more than 200,000 glaciers world-wide,” he told the Monitor here. “With GRACE, though, we’re able to directly monitor the sum total of all ice loss in an entire glacier system or ice cap.”

For instance, scientists had incomplete data for many inaccessible glaciers in Asian mountains, particularly those scattered throughout the Himalayas. The eye-in-the-sky accuracy of GRACE cut the amount of estimated ice loss from Asian glaciers to about 4 billion tons per year, about 10 times less than some previous estimates. This new insight dominated much of the extensive online coverage of the study.

“The GRACE results in (the Asian region) really were a surprise,” Wahr commented here. “One possible explanation is that previous estimates were based on measurements taken primarily from some of the lower, more accessible glaciers in Asia and were extrapolated to infer the behavior of higher glaciers. But unlike the lower glaciers, many of the high glaciers would still be too cold to lose mass even in the presence of atmospheric warming.”

The bottom line? Sea level rise caused by all of the planet’s land-based ice melt (not counting the expansion of water due to warming) was about 1.5 millimeters per year annually from 2003 to 2010, according to the study. That’s about 12 millimeters, or one-half inch over eight years, from glacial wastage alone.

Throw in the thermal expansion of water as it grows warmer, and the total estimated rise in sea level over that period was more than double.

“One big question is how sea level rise is going to change in this century,” added co-author Tad Pfeffer, a CU-Boulder professor who has done extensive work measuring the mass balance of Alaska glaciers, in this story.

“If we could understand the physics more completely and perfect numerical models to simulate all of the processes controlling sea level — especially glacier and ice sheet changes — we would have a much better means to make predictions. But we are not quite there yet.”

Contact Doug O’Harra at doug(at)alaskadispatch.com

Antarctic Guide
info@antarcticguide.com
www.AntarcticGuide.com
Twitter: AntarcticGuide

www.AntarcticGuide.com

‘It’s like exploring another planet’: Russians reach Antarctic lake in scientific coup
February 9, 2012 – 7:59AM

After more than two decades of drilling in Antarctica, Russian scientists have reached a gigantic freshwater lake hidden under miles of ice for some 20 million years — a pristine body of water that may hold life from the distant past and clues to the search for life on other planets.

Finally touching the surface of Lake Vostok, the largest of nearly 400 subglacial lakes in Antarctica, is a major discovery avidly anticipated by scientists around the world.

Valery Lukin, the head of Russia’s Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute (AARI) who oversaw the mission and announced its success, likened the endeavor to the epic race to the moon won by American scientists over the Soviets in 1969.

The Russian team hit the lake Sunday at the depth of 12,366 feet (3769 metres) about 800 miles (1300 kilometres) southeast of the South Pole in the central part of the continent.

Scientists hope the lake may allow a glimpse into microbial life forms that existed before the Ice Age and are not visible to the naked eye. Scientists believe that microbial life may exist in the dark depths of the lake despite its high pressure and constant cold — conditions similar to those expected to be found under the ice crust on Mars, Jupiter’s moon Europa and Saturn’s moon Enceladus.

“In the simplest sense, it can transform the way we think about life,” NASA’s chief scientist Waleed Abdalati said.

American and British teams are drilling to reach their own subglacial Antarctic lakes, but Columbia University glaciologist Robin Bell said those lakes are smaller and younger than Vostok, which is the big scientific prize.

“It’s like exploring another planet, except this one is ours,” she said.

Lake Vostok is 160 miles (250 kilometres) long and 30 miles (50 kilometres) across at its widest point, similar in area to Lake Ontario. It’s kept from freezing into a solid block by the mammoth crust of ice across it that acts like a blanket, keeping in heat generated by geothermal energy underneath.

The technological challenges of drilling through the ice crust in the world’s coldest environment have made the project unique.

Temperatures on the Vostok Station on the surface above have registered the coldest ever recorded on Earth, reaching minus 89 degrees Celsius (minus 128 degrees Fahrenheit), and conditions were made even tougher by its high elevation, more than 11,000 feet (3300 metres) above sea level, resulting in thin oxygen.

The effort, however, has drawn strong fears that 60 metric tons (66 tons) of lubricants and antifreeze used in the drilling may contaminate the pristine lake. Bell said the Russian team was doing its best “to try really hard to do it right” and avoid contamination, but some others were nervous.

University of Colorado geological sciences professor James White was among those who urged caution about drilling into subglacial lakes.

“Lake Vostok is the crown jewel of lakes there,” White said by telephone. “These are the last frontiers on the planet we are exploring, we really ought to be very careful.”

Lukin said Russia had waited for several years for international approval of its drilling technology before proceeding to reach the lake. He said about 1.5 cubic metres (50 cubic feet) of kerosene and freon poured up to the surface tanks from the boreshaft, proof that the lake water streamed up from underneath, froze and then blocked the hole, sealing off the chance that any toxic chemicals could contaminate.

Russian scientists will later remove the frozen sample for analysis in December when the next Antarctic summer season comes. They reached the lake just before they had to leave at the end of the Antarctic summer, as plunging temperatures halted air links.

Some scientists hope that studies of Lake Vostok and other subglacial lakes will advance knowledge of Earth’s own climate and help predict its changes.

“It is an important milestone that has been completed and a major achievement for the Russians because they’ve been working on this for years,” said Professor Martin Siegert, a leading scientist with the British Antarctic Survey, which is trying to reach another Antarctic subglacial lake, Lake Ellsworth.

“The Russian team share our mission to understand subglacial lake environments and we look forward to developing collaborations with their scientists and also those from the US and other nations, as we all embark on a quest to comprehend these pristine, extreme environments,” he said in an email.

Americans scientists are drilling at Lake Whillans, west of the South Pole.

In the future, Russian researchers plan to explore the lake using an underwater robot equipped with video cameras that would collect water samples and sediments from the bottom of the lake, a project still awaiting the approval of the Antarctic Treaty organisation.

The prospect of lakes hidden under Antarctic ice was first put forward by Russian scientist and anarchist revolutionary, Prince Pyotr Kropotkin, at the end of the 19th century. Russian geographer Andrei Kapitsa noted the likely location of the lake and named it following Soviet Antarctic missions in the 1950s and 1960s, but it wasn’t until 1994 that its existence was proven by Russian and British scientists.

The drilling in the area began in 1989 and dragged on slowly due to funding shortages, equipment breakdowns, environmental concerns and severe cold.

The lake’s pristine water may make entrepreneurs sweat just thinking of its commercial potential, but Lukin shot that idea right down.

He said his team had no intention of selling any Vostok water samples but would eventually share the results of their work with scientists from other nations.
AP

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/world/science/its-like-exploring-another-planet-russians-reach-antarctic-lake-in-scientific-coup-20120209-1rkc2.html#ixzz1lpnOw8Ey

Antarctic Guide
info@antarcticguide.com
www.AntarcticGuide.com
Twitter: AntarcticGuide

www.AntarcticGuide.com
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/02/120206-russia-lake-vostok-antarctica-drilling-science-glacier/?source=link_fb20120206news-antarctica

Russians “Close” to Drilling Into Antarctica’s Lake Vostok
Would be first to breach a subglacial lake on the frozen continent.

Christine Dell’Amore
National Geographic News
Published February 6, 2012

Russian scientists are “very, very close” to reaching the surface of afreshwater lake 2.3 miles (3,768) meters under the Antarctic ice, news reports say. It would be the first time anyone has penetrated a subglacial lake on the frozen continent.

The Russian news agency RIA Novosti reported today that the team has in fact breached the Lake Vostok.

However Mahlon C. Kennicutt II, a professor of oceanography at Texas A&M University who leads several Antarctic research groups, said the report should be viewed with skepticism until an official announcement is made.

“I would be surprised if it was announced officially this quiet. Also, the one source [in the article] is unnamed, so it is hard to tell,” he said.

Montana State ecologist John Priscu echoed Kennicutt’s caution. “There are a lot of rumors going around about penetrating the lake, and we need the Russian program to make the official announcement,” Priscu told National Geographic News via email.

Scientists have been drilling this shaft toward Lake Vostok—one of the world’s largest freshwater lakes—since the lake was discovered in 1996. This field season, the Russian team has been drilling since the beginning of January.

As of February 6, the team was within 16 to 32 feet (5 to 10 meters) of reaching the under-ice lake, Priscu told BBC News.

With the Antarctic summer rapidly coming to a close, it’s now or next year for the scientists, who are hoping to probe the Great Lake-size water body for the first time in 25 million years.

Once it happens, “it’ll be a big splash, and I mean that metaphorically,” Texas A&M’s Kennicutt said.

Race to the Lake

Lake Vostok is the largest of more than 145 subglacial lakes—most of them several kilometers long—that have been discovered under the Antarctic ice in past decades.

These subglacial lakes may open a new window onto our planet, for example by offering new insights into climate history or revealing unknown life-forms.

Montana State’s Priscu, for instance, has found evidence that microbes could live in the subglacial lake, deriving energy from minerals—”eating rocks,” as he told National Geographic News in 2007.

Regardless of what they find, if the Russian team succeeds, “their efforts will transform the way we do science in Antarctica and provide us with an entirely new view of what exists under the vast Antarctic ice sheet,” Priscu said Monday.

(See “Antarctica May Contain ‘Oasis of Life.'”)

The water bodies’ discoveries have also prompted a “race to the lakes”—similar to the early 20th-century race to the South Pole—from various research teams vying to be the first to penetrate a subglacial lake, Texas A&M’s Kennicutt said.

The British, for example, plan to drill into another Antarctic lake, Lake Ellsworth, in the 2012-13 summer season, he said.

The Russian effort has been slowed by efforts to insure the drilling won’t contaminate the lake water. The team, for example, was to use a hot-water drill during the last few meters to prevent any foreign material from entering the lake environment, Kennicutt said.

Reaching Lake Vostok “has become more than a scientific question—this is the centerpiece of the Russian Antarctic program,” Kennicutt said.

“There’s national pride, and the first-entry moniker is very important nationally to the Russians.”

Antarctic Guide
info@antarcticguide.com
www.AntarcticGuide.com
Twitter: AntarcticGuide

www.AntarcticGuide.com
http://gulfnews.com/news/gulf/uae/environment/penguins-set-to-make-a-big-splash-at-indoor-ski-facility-1.974061

Penguins set to make a big splash at indoor ski facility
20 birds born and bred in captivity arrive in dubai from texas

Dubai: Newly arrived penguins appear to be quickly adapting to their sub-zero Celsius home at SkiDubai replete with an ice-cold swimming pool and private living quarters designed to replicate Antarctic conditions.
Born and bred in captivity, ten King penguins as well as ten Gentoo penguins were flown 5,799km from SeaWorld in San Antonio, Texas to Dubai as part of the new Snow Penguins exhibit at the indoor ski facility.
SkiDubai will open its penguin enclosure to the public on February 5.
Fahad Al Lawati, manager commercial and communications for Majid Al Futtaim, said the new attraction will offer “a unique experience” to paid visitors in the coming years.
Omar Al Banna, marketing and sales director for Majid Al Futtaim, said the arrival of the penguins will “add value to the community … and take SkiDubai to the next level.”
Noting that the birds were “hatched and raised in the care of humans,” Al Banna said SkiDubai will “do what we can to protect the penguins and create awareness about the environment”.
By offering residents through the Peng-Friend programme a chance to get up close and personal with the birds, the attraction will indirectly help conservation efforts aimed at preserving the natural environment.
Newly established pairs are already courting in their new Dubai digs and it may only be a matter of time before SkiDubai could witness the hatching of native-born penguins in the emirate.
As many as 20 public penguin encounters will be scheduled each day in which visitors over the age of three will be granted face time and underwater viewing of the birds swimming. Visitors at all times will be accompanied by staff. Personal cameras will not be allowed into the enclosure.
Tom Scheffer, SkiDubai operations manager, said “We’re the first in the Middle East to have King penguins in our colony.”
Captivity: right conditions seen
Penguins right at home given right conditions. Dubai Marine ecologist Keith Wilson will be the first to tell you he’s no expert on Antarctic penguins.
But the marine programme director at UAE-based Emirates Marine Environmental Group said he has no objections to housing penguins in a specially-designed enclosure at SkiDubai given the birds were hatched and raised in captivity.
By contrast, zoos and animal facilities can run into trouble when attempting to move wild animals caught in nature and penning them into man-made structures which is not the case with these penguins, he said.

Antarctic Guide
info@antarcticguide.com
www.AntarcticGuide.com
Twitter: AntarcticGuide

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/46227647/ns/technology_and_science-science/#.Ty9ZkZj2xLI
www.AntarcticGuide.com

A stunning photo captures growing Antarctic ice rift
Shot of beginning stages of birth at calving Pine Island Glacier iceberg taken from space

This growing rift is in the ice shelf at the floating end of the Pine Island Glacier, a slow-moving river of ice in West Antarctica that moves ice from the interior of the continent out to sea.

A massive crack in a huge sheet of Antarctic ice discovered in mid-October last year is steadily growing, as seen in recently released satellite images.
The fissure in the Pine Island Glacier ice shelf marks the beginning stages of the birth of a 350-square-mile (900 square kilometers) iceberg, part of a natural process known as calving.
The image was snapped on Nov. 13, 2011, when the rift was roughly 19 miles (30 km) long, 260 feet (80 meters) wide for most of its length, and 195 feet (60 m) deep. When researchers first spotted the crack in mid-October, it was roughly 18 miles (28 km) long.
The ice shelf is the floating end of the Pine Island Glacier, a slow-moving river of ice in West Antarctica that moves ice from the interior of the continent out to sea.
The recent discovery that the glacier has markedly sped up over the last decade has provoked a flurry of research interest in Pine Island Glacier and its ice shelf, whose sudden changes are almost undoubtedly caused by climate change and warming oceans in the region.
However, the calving iceberg itself is the result of a cyclical process, not climate change, scientists say.
In fact, researchers had been expecting the ice shelf to produce a large iceberg sometime soon. The ice shelf last produced large icebergs in 2001 and 2007, and these calving events appear to happen on a roughly decade-long cycle.

Antarctic Guide
info@antarcticguide.com
www.AntarcticGuide.com
Twitter: AntarcticGuide

www.AntarcticGuide.com
http://enter-russia.com/post/16916750417/russian-museum-goes-antarctica

Russian Museum goes to Antarctica

Antarctica is to get its first museum thanks to Russia.

Authorities have decided to open up a branch of the Russian Museum at the Novolazarevskaya base on the Antarctic continent.

It’ll be the closest museum to the South Pole, and serves a population of 70 in the summer months.

The sailing vessel Mir will be the venue for the multi-media project which will become the museum’s 100th virtual branch.

It’s all aimed at promoting Russian art in remote regions of Russia, and the world. There are already 99 branches in places like China, India, Greece and Belgium, but this is the furthest from home.

The virtual museum allows visitors to explore the rich heritage of Russia through films and educational materials.

Antarctic Guide
info@antarcticguide.com
www.AntarcticGuide.com
Twitter: AntarcticGuide

www.AntarcticGuide.com
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2012/012312-ptc-conference-255180.html?hpg1=bn

Global warming could enable undersea Arctic telecom route
Cloud computing and disaster recovery drive expansion of undersea optical telecommunications networks
By Jay Gillette, Network World

HONOLULU — “Harnessing Disruption: Global, Mobile, Social, Local,” was the theme at the 34rd Pacific Telecommunications Council (PTC) conference last week in Honolulu.

As international telecommunications demand continues to expand against a background of global disruption, several thousand technology professionals with Asia-Pacific interests gathered for the annual conference. There were delegates and deal-makers from 54 countries and Honolulu-based PTC, the nongovernmental telecom industry organization, announced that the meeting surpassed its record attendance from last year.

Professionals from the United States were the largest bloc, with China next, followed by Japan, India, Singapore, Europe and elsewhere. Industry sector representatives from satellite to undersea cable to wholesale telecommunications to call center operators, and academics, regulators, government and economic development specialists rubbed elbows in the casual yet high-stakes atmosphere.

Keynoter William Barney of Pacnet said the last four years were the most difficult in the telecommunications industry, due to economic recession, intense competition, and technology disruption and substitution. Yet he said that trends are building unprecedented opportunities for network providers, especially in cloud computing. These will allowapplications services at unprecedented scale.

Subsea capacity booms, bringing new routes, including potential Arctic bypass
Some of the biggest news was continuing growth of subsea optical transmission networking, despite the fact that there’s already ample “lit-capacity,” or deployed network resources. In trans-Atlantic routes, for example, less than half lit-capacity is used.

Technical improvements have increased speed and extended the life of previously laid cables, but new routes and landing sites are adding lit-capacity worldwide. Many operators are adding capacity to provide reliability and redundancy, as well as new routes that reduce latency.

There is also discussion that unprecedented, previously unfeasible, Arctic routes now may be possible, because of melting Arctic icecap. These would allow traffic to flow from Asia directly to Europe, bypassing North American networks completely.

As to what is driving this demand, TeleGeography market researchers report that in the typical Atlantic route, for example, 75% of used subsea capacity carries Internet traffic, with a miniscule commitment to switched voice of just 0.2%. Private network traffic accounts for the rest of used subsea capacity. There will be no international carriage bottlenecks in the foreseeable future, notwithstanding earlier prophecy of capacity scarcity. This feared prediction is just not happening, according to reports at the conference.

Delegates again emphasized the continuing shift in the ratio of outbound Middle East communications traffic declining toward Europe and North America and increasing toward Asia. Traffic is rapidly increasing in Africa and other previously underserved areas, but U.S. inbound and outbound traffic still dominates. For example, conference sponsor Infinera touted its 100G Ethernet switching capacity with NTT partner Pacific Crossing’s 9,500-kilometer transpacific cable. Their target is to access Asia’s 922 million Internet users, according to their strategic vision.

Antarctic Guide
info@antarcticguide.com
www.AntarcticGuide.com
Twitter: AntarcticGuide