The Mars Desert Research Station, located in the Utah desert near the town of Hanksville, is a simulated Mars habitat that serves as a testbed for field operations studies in preparation for future human missions to Mars.

Volunteer crews live at the station, testing habitat design features and technologies. From December 27 to January 2, six college students served as the MDRS crew, as participants in NASA's Spaceward Bound program.

East Antarctica is home to the Earth’s oldest ice and harbors some of the most important information about past and future climate change, yet it is the least explored part of the Antarctic continent. The Norwegian-U.S. Scientific Traverse of Antarctica involves two overland traverses of East Antarctica: one in 2007-2008, and a return traverse via a different route in 2008-2009. The project will revisit sites that were first explored in the 1960s to look for signs of change since then and to set benchmarks for future research in the area.

Beneath the central Antarctic ice sheet lies Lake Vostok -- a frozen freshwater lake about the size of Lake Ontario, with depths up to 650 feet. Now, scientists believe that Saturn's icy moon Enceladus may harbor a similar underground reservoir.

For the second time in only two weeks, a large group of long-finned pilot whales has died after stranding themselves in a rocky area known as Sandy Cape on the remote western coast of Tasmania, Australia. On November 29, more than 150 whales died, turning the waters of the Indian Ocean red when they suffered deep cuts after being battered by rough surf and thrashing against jagged rocks.

Nearly four years after a series of disastrous tsunami waves struck coastlines bordering the Indian Ocean, a new Tsunami Early Warning System is up and running in Indonesia. Using a series of buoys linked to detectors that sit on the ocean floor, the new high-tech warning system will be able to detect an undersea earthquake and predict within minutes whether it will cause a tsunami.

Four scientists are now disputing the recent discovery of rare dinosaur tracks in a remote area near the Utah-Arizona border. According to the original study, which was published in the October issue of the paleontology journal Palaios and widely reported around the world, a large concentration of dinosaur tracks and rare tail-drag marks was found in a dinosaur "trample surface" in the Vermilion Cliffs National Monument. But Brent Breithaupt of the University of Wyoming Geological Museum, Alan Titus and Rody Cox of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, and Andrew Milner of St. George Dinosaur Discovery Site at Johnson Farm believe the dinosaur tracks are actually just sandstone potholes, created by erosion and weathering.

About 190 million years ago, during the Early Jurassic Period, a vast desert larger than the Sahara covered much of what is now Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and Nevada. Given that Jurassic time was the "Age of Dinosaurs," it's not surprising that fossil evidence of the great reptiles would show up there now and then. But recently, geologists from the University of Utah uncovered an exceptional find -- a large concentration of dinosaur tracks and rare tail-drag marks.

The thought of studying sea ice conjures up visions of scientists wrapped in expedition-weight parkas straddling dangerous ice cracks to take measurements. And when it comes to on-the-ground fieldwork, that image isn't far off base. But in recent years, a remote-controlled robotic plane has made work conditions a bit more tolerable for researchers who study the ice.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) were used to take aerial photos as early as the 1970s, but it wasn't until 2000 that they began to play a role in studying the physics of sea ice.

The "termination shock" sounds like the stuff science fiction movies are made of. In reality, it marks the boundary between our solar system and interstellar space. The invisible "shock" forms as our sun's solar winds begin to encounter the gases and magnetic fields of outer space, which slows the winds down abruptly.

As increased levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO₂) dissolve in the Earth's oceans, seawater is becoming warmer and more acidic. Now, a new study concludes that one result of more acidic seas is that sounds will travel farther underwater. A corresponding increase in background noise in the oceans could affect the behavior of marine mammals, a team of scientists at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) says.

In a Mars exploration milestone, a laser remote sensing instrument on the Phoenix Mars lander has detected snow falling on the red planet. Data from the light detection and ranging (lidar) instrument—designed to gather information about interactions between the Martian atmosphere and ground surface—showed the snow falling from clouds about 4 kilometers (2.5 miles) above the spacecraft's landing site.

Scientists say Arctic ice shelves located along the northern coast of Canada's Ellesmere Island have undergone massive changes during the summer of 2008. In July, a large section of the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf -- the largest in the Canadian Arctic -- broke off from Ellesmere Island. The entire Markham Ice Shelf broke away in early August and is now adrift in the Arctic Ocean. And two large sections of ice detached from the Serson Ice Shelf, reducing its size by 60 percent.

With so much focus on sea ice and ice shelves, the role of permafrost in the global climate cycle is often not on the public's radar screen. But according to a new study published last week in the journal Bioscience, permafrost in the Northern Hemisphere contains more than two times the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, and rapid thawing could make it a significant contributor to global climate change.

It's becoming a familiar story: robots on the surface of Mars outlasting their expected lifespan. Take the Mars Exploration Rovers Spirit and Opportunity, for example. The rovers landed on Mars in 2004 and have performed so well that NASA has extended their mission activities five times in the past three years.

Weeks before Hurricane Gustav slammed into the Caribbean and the Louisiana Gulf Coast, hurricane forecasters at Colorado State University continued to warn of the higher-than-average probability of at least one intense (or major) hurricane making landfall in the United States in the remaining months of this year's hurricane season.