Antarctica | featured news

Every animal with bones has blood with hemoglobin, which binds with oxygen and makes the blood appear red. Every animal, that is, except one. The ocellated icefish (Chionodraco rastrospinosus) has gin-clear blood. And it has no scales. And it lives nowhere but the inky depths down to 3,200 feet (1 kilometer) in the icy waters off Antarctica.

A new university-led study with NASA participation finds ancient Antarctica was much warmer and wetter than previously suspected. The climate was suitable to support substantial vegetation -- including stunted trees -- along the edges of the frozen continent.

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

The massive and apparently stable East Antarctic ice sheet is losing mass, a new study suggests.

A Russian icebreaker carrying over 100 tourists, scientists and journalists on a cruise around Antarctica has become stuck in the ice but is not in danger, a shipping company said Tuesday.

“On the rocks” has a whole new meaning: A beverage company has asked a team to drill through Antarctica's ice for two crates of Scotch whiskey that were shipped there by British explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton as part of his abandoned 1909 expedition.