the_bloggers

Note: Please welcome our newest blogger, Explorer Todd Carmichael. Check out this video to learn a little more about Todd and read our welcome message here.

Soon I’'ll be standing at the intersection of 80 degrees West and 80 degrees South.

It’s a place I know well, a point seemingly on the edge of the planet, or close to it. Its name is Hercules Inlet and it is found on the very rim of Antarctica. Moments before I'll have shaken hands with my pilot and nervously watched as he teased his plane back into the sky. His name is Robert, his will be the last face I’ll see for nearly two months.

Even us Polar Explorers are on Facebook! While this is where you can find all the updates on my preparations for the trip and daily dispatches when I'm in the South Pole, you can also find them on here on the Expedition Earth Facebook group.

Please join and help spread the message by asking all your friends on Facebook to join up as well!

Thanks!

The BBC is reporting that there's new dramatic evidence of the break-up of the Arctic ice-cap emerging from research during an expedition by the Canadian military.

Watch the video of the fractures in the Arctic ice shelves here.

It's winter right now in the Antarctic, and with temperatures hovering around -91 degrees Fahrenheit, it was a strange sight indeed for the European Space Agency to see a 160 square kilometer chunk of the Wilkins Ice Shelf collapse.

The North Pole could be free of sea ice for the first time in recorded history this summer, according to National Geographic News.

And that would have the effect of speeding global warming, as highly reflective ice gives way to heat absorbing water in the high Arctic.

As NatGeo reports, scientists were shocked last year when the high Arctic lost 65 per cent of its ice cover in one year, an unprecedented loss over a time scale they previously thought was impossible. And, perversely, that generates more of the Deniers' favorite commodity: doubt.

We can all now doubt that things were as bad as we might have feared. As it turns out: they're worse.