An iceberg sealed the penguin colony's entrance, triggering a 70% survival drop. A group of Emperor penguin chicks is walking on the fast ice at the Emperor penguin colony at Snow Hill Island in the Weddell Sea in Antarctica. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. A massive iceberg has triggered a catastrophic die-off of Emperor Penguin chicks in Antarctica, blocking thousands of parents from reaching their young. The event claimed the lives of approximately 14,000 chicks at the Coulman Island colony in the Ross Sea, the region's largest breeding ground.

Scientific progress in Earth science depends on integrating data across the planet's interconnected spheres. However, the accelerating volume and fragmentation of multi-sphere knowledge and data have surpassed human analytical capacity. This creates a major bottleneck for discovery, especially in climate science. To address this challenge, we introduce EarthLink, the first self-evolving AI agent system designed as an interactive "copilot" for Earth scientists. Through natural language interaction, EarthLink automates the entire research workflow by integrating planning, code execution, data analysis, and physical reasoning into a unified process that directly addresses this limitation. Beyond efficiency, it exhibits human-like cross-disciplinary analytical ability and achieves proficiency comparable to a junior researcher in expert evaluations on core large-scale climate tasks, including model-observation comparison and climate change understanding. When tasked with an open scientific problem, specifically the discovery of precursors of the Atlantic Niño, EarthLink autonomously developed a research strategy, identified sources of predictability, verified its hypotheses with available data, and proposed a physically consistent mechanism. These emerging capabilities enable a new human-AI research paradigm. Scientists can focus on value and result judgments, while AI systems handle complex data analysis and knowledge integration. This accelerates the pace and breadth of discovery in Earth sciences. The system is accessible at our website https://earthlink.intern-ai.org.cn.

Environment Animals Wildlife Fish The quest to find Shackleton's ship uncovered an Antarctic mystery Beneath the ice, an underwater robot discovered something far stranger than the'Endurance' shipwreck. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. The Antarctic Ocean's brutal conditions ultimately doomed Ernest Shackleton's famed 1915 expedition aboard the . Although the icy environment has quickly turned fatal for many unfortunate explorers, it's not an entirely inhospitable place . While attempting to locate Shackleton's sunken ship in 2019, researchers unexpectedly documented a strange sight-a sprawling, geometric complex of over 1,000 icefish nests .

Ernest Shackleton knew'Endurance' had shortcomings, new study says Issues with the ship's hull, deck beams, and more show the ship was no match for Antarctic sea ice. The'Endurance' leaning to one side, during the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, 1914-17, led by Sir Ernest Shackleton. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. For almost 110 years, the has rested at the bottom of the icy waters of the Antarctic's Weddell Sea . Long held as the poster ship for Antarctic exploration, Sir Ernest Shackleton's ill-fated ship was no match for the crushing sea ice that sank it in November 1915 .

Drifting icebergs in the polar oceans play a key role in the Earth's climate system, impacting freshwater fluxes into the ocean and regional ecosystems while also posing a challenge to polar navigation. However, accurately forecasting iceberg trajectories remains a formidable challenge, primarily due to the scarcity of spatiotemporal data and the complex, nonlinear nature of iceberg motion, which is also impacted by environmental variables. The iceberg motion is influenced by multiple dynamic environmental factors, creating a highly variable system that makes trajectory identification complex. These limitations hinder the ability of deep learning models to effectively capture the underlying dynamics and provide reliable predictive outcomes. To address these challenges, we propose a hybrid IDRIFTNET model, a physics-driven deep learning model that combines an analytical formulation of iceberg drift physics, with an augmented residual learning model. The model learns the pattern of mismatch between the analytical solution and ground-truth observations, which is combined with a rotate-augmented spectral neural network that captures both global and local patterns from the data to forecast future iceberg drift positions. We compare IDRIFTNET model performance with state-of-the-art models on two Antarctic icebergs: A23A and B22A. Our findings demonstrate that IDRIFTNET outperforms other models by achieving a lower Final Displacement Error (FDE) and Average Displacement Error (ADE) across a variety of time points. These results highlight IDRIFTNET's effectiveness in capturing the complex, nonlinear drift of icebergs for forecasting iceberg trajectories under limited data and dynamic environmental conditions.

The wreck was like a bug on the wall, a jumbly shape splayed on the abyssal plain. It was noticed by a team of autonomous-underwater-vehicle operators on board a subsea exploration vessel, working at an undisclosed location in the Atlantic Ocean, about a thousand miles from the nearest shore. The analysts belonged to a small private company that specializes in deep-sea search operations; I have been asked not to name it. They were looking for something else. In the past decade, the company has helped to transform the exploration of the seabed by deploying fleets of A.U.V.s--underwater drones--which cruise in formation, mapping large areas of the ocean floor with high-definition imagery.

Its discovery 3,000 metres beneath the Antarctic ice in 2022 was nothing short of miraculous. But now, stunning images make it possible to see Ernest Shackleton's ship, Endurance, like never before. Released as part of a new documentary called Endurance, this model shows exactly what the ship would have looked like before it was lost to the ice in 1915. From plates used for the daily meals to the flare gun fired in tribute to the sinking ship, the scan reveals the minute details of life aboard Endurance. Nico Vincent, of Deep Ocean Search who developed the technology for the scan, told the BBC: 'It's absolutely fabulous.

Data-driven machine learning models for weather forecasting have made transformational progress in the last 1-2 years, with state-of-the-art ones now outperforming the best physics-based models for a wide range of skill scores. Given the strong links between weather and climate modelling, this raises the question whether machine learning models could also revolutionize climate science, for example by informing mitigation and adaptation to climate change or to generate larger ensembles for more robust uncertainty estimates. Here, we show that current state-of-the-art machine learning models trained for weather forecasting in present-day climate produce skillful forecasts across different climate states corresponding to pre-industrial, present-day, and future 2.9K warmer climates. This indicates that the dynamics shaping the weather on short timescales may not differ fundamentally in a changing climate. It also demonstrates out-of-distribution generalization capabilities of the machine learning models that are a critical prerequisite for climate applications. Nonetheless, two of the models show a global-mean cold bias in the forecasts for the future warmer climate state, i.e. they drift towards the colder present-day climate they have been trained for. A similar result is obtained for the pre-industrial case where two out of three models show a warming. We discuss possible remedies for these biases and analyze their spatial distribution, revealing complex warming and cooling patterns that are partly related to missing ocean-sea ice and land surface information in the training data. Despite these current limitations, our results suggest that data-driven machine learning models will provide powerful tools for climate science and transform established approaches by complementing conventional physics-based models.

Full-complexity Earth system models (ESMs) are computationally very expensive, limiting their use in exploring the climate outcomes of multiple emission pathways. More efficient emulators that approximate ESMs can directly map emissions onto climate outcomes, and benchmarks are being used to evaluate their accuracy on standardized tasks and datasets. We investigate a popular benchmark in data-driven climate emulation, ClimateBench, on which deep learning-based emulators are currently achieving the best performance. We implement a linear regression-based emulator, akin to pattern scaling, and find that it outperforms the incumbent 100M-parameter deep learning foundation model, ClimaX, on 3 out of 4 regionally-resolved surface-level climate variables. While emulating surface temperature is expected to be predominantly linear, this result is surprising for emulating precipitation. We identify that this outcome is a result of high levels of internal variability in the benchmark targets. To address internal variability, we update the benchmark targets with ensemble averages from the MPI-ESM1.2-LR model that contain 50 instead of 3 climate simulations per emission pathway. Using the new targets, we show that linear pattern scaling continues to be more accurate on temperature, but can be outperformed by a deep learning-based model for emulating precipitation. We publish our code, data, and an interactive tutorial at github.com/blutjens/climate-emulator.

We propose a novel technique for guidance of buoyancy-controlled vehicles in uncertain under-ice ocean flows. In-situ melt rate measurements collected at the grounding zone of Antarctic ice shelves, where the ice shelf meets the underlying bedrock, are essential to constrain models of future sea level rise. Buoyancy-controlled vehicles, which control their vertical position in the water column through internal actuation but have no means of horizontal propulsion, offer an affordable and reliable platform for such in-situ data collection. However, reaching the grounding zone requires vehicles to traverse tens of kilometers under the ice shelf, with approximate position knowledge and no means of communication, in highly variable and uncertain ocean currents. To address this challenge, we propose a partially observable MDP approach that exploits model-based knowledge of the under-ice currents and, critically, of their uncertainty, to synthesize effective guidance policies. The approach uses approximate dynamic programming to model uncertainty in the currents, and QMDP to address localization uncertainty. Numerical experiments show that the policy can deliver up to 88.8% of underwater vehicles to the grounding zone -- a 33% improvement compared to state-of-the-art guidance techniques, and a 262% improvement over uncontrolled drifters. Collectively, these results show that model-based under-ice guidance is a highly promising technique for exploration of under-ice cavities, and has the potential to enable cost-effective and scalable access to these challenging and rarely observed environments.