This story, about the discovery of a long lost ship, is a fascinating way to discuss early exploration efforts as well as global warming. In 1845 two ships led by Sir John Franklin left England searching for a northern route across the globe, known as the Northwest Passage. They never returned. 169 years later, a helicopter pilot found a clue that led the Canadian government to one of the missing ships. From sonar imaging to video cameras on submarines, archeologists have confirmed that this is one of the abandoned ships from the famous expedition.

From EGU  --  A team of scientists lead by the American Ian Eisenman has suggested that maybe the amount of sea ice in the Antarctic hasn’t been increasing as fast as people had thought.

From EGU  --  Scientists drilling for ice in Antarctica have been able to find ice with bubbles up to 800,000 years old, but now they want to find out what Earth’s atmosphere was like before then. Swiss-based scientist Hubertus Fischer and other researchers want to find ice that is up to 1.5 million years old, so that they can study really old air to know what the Earth’s climate was like even further in the past.

From EGU  --  The Jakobshavn Isbræ glacier has always been fast – even in the 1990s it was considered to be one of the fastest moving glaciers in the world – but American and German scientists have now confirmed that it is moving at almost four times its previous speed!

From USGS  --  Climate change research in Glacier National Park, Montana entails many methods of documenting the landscape change, including the decline of the parks namesake glaciers. While less quantitative than other high-tech methods of recording glacial mass, depth, and rate of retreat, repeat photography has become a valuable tool for communicating effects of global warming.

From NSF  --  New mathematical methods can be applied broadly to climate, medicine, aircraft design and more.

People don't usually think of mathematics as an occupation that requires survival skills, but they might change their minds if they saw Kenneth Golden and his daring research team in action!

From Smithsonian Magazine  --  Even in northern Minnesota right now, the temperature has dipped to a staggering -42 F. The chill is running so deep in the North Star State that it’s not only colder than in the lands above the Arctic Circle, it’s actually colder than some of the daily temperatures on Mars—you know, the planet 78 million miles further from the Sun on average.

From NASA - What is the coldest place on Earth? It is a high ridge in Antarctica on the East Antarctic Plateau where temperatures in several hollows can dip below minus 133.6 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 92 degrees Celsius) on a clear winter night. Scientists made the discovery while analyzing the most detailed global surface temperature maps to date, developed with data from remote sensing satellites including the new Landsat 8, a joint project of NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS).

Maps on the National Geographic website show the world as it is now, with only one difference: All the ice on land has melted and drained into the sea, raising it 216 feet and creating new shorelines for our continents and inland seas.

There are more than five million cubic miles of ice on Earth, and some scientists say it would take more than 5,000 years to melt it all. If we continue adding carbon to the atmosphere, we will very likely create an ice-free planet, with an average temperature of perhaps 80 degrees Fahrenheit instead of the current 58.

From our friends at the American Geosciences Institute - AGI now offers award-winning videos and related classroom activities to help students, educators, and others explore the “big ideas” of Earth science during Earth Science Week 2013 (October 13-19) and all year long. New this year are 35 additional activities selected specifically to help educators teach about the core concepts of Earth science.