While the weather outside may indeed get frightful this winter, a parka, knit hat, wool socks, insulated boots and maybe a roaring fire make things bearable for people who live in cold climates. But what about all the wildlife out there? Won't they be freezing? […]

Sea ice cover in Antarctica shrank rapidly to a record low in late 2016 and has remained well below average. But what's behind this dramatic melting and low ice cover since? […]

Two new species of fungi have made an appearance in a rapidly melting glacier on Ellesmere Island in the Canadian Arctic, just west of Greenland. A collaborative team of researchers from Japan's National Institute of Polar Research, The Graduate University for Advanced Studies in Tokyo, Japan, and Laval University in Québec, Canada made the discovery. […]

Global warming is causing increasing damage in the world's permafrost regions. As the new global comparative study conducted by the international permafrost network GTN-P shows, in all regions with permafrost soils the temperature of the frozen ground at a depth of more than 10 metres rose by an average of 0.3 degrees Celsius between 2007 and 2016—in the Arctic and Antarctic, as well as the high mountain ranges of Europe and Central Asia. The effect was most pronounced in Siberia, where […]

Optical properties of materials are based on their chemistry and the inherent subwavelength architecture, although the latter remains to be characterized in depth. Photonic crystals and metamaterials have proven this by providing access through surface alterations to a new level of light manipulation beyond the known natural optical properties of materials. Yet, in the past three decades of research, technical methods have been unable to reliably nanostructure hard optical crystals beyond the […]