The Cassini spacecraft, charged with exploring Saturn and its moons, has beamed back a new image of Enceladus, a mysterious moon that is one of the few places in our solar system believed to have the ingredients for hosting life. While it has been known for some time now that Enceladus has ice geysers, this latest image clearly shows just how active the moon is. All those plumes you see are ice geysers! What a sight that must be up close and personal. Great spot for an orbiting restaurant down the road.

The long-rumored, long-sought cases of brandy and whisky buried by the famous explorer Ernest Shackelton in Antarctica has finally been located and unearthed.  Buried over 100 years ago by the polar explorer, researchers finally brought the crates up from its icy grave and discovered several broken bottles, but the sound of swishing liquid in other crates indicates several bottles will remain intact once the lid is lifted.

It was anticipated that no more than two creates would be found, but researchers managed to locate five crates.

“The unexpected find of the brandy crates, one labelled Chas. Mackinlay & Co and the other labelled The Hunter Valley Distillery Limited Allandale (Australia) are a real bonus,” said team leader Al Fastier.

The crates were originally found under the hut’s floorboards in 2006, but they were too deeply embedded in ice to be dislodged.

The New Zealanders agreed to drill the ice to try to retrieve some bottles, although the rest must stay under conservation guidelines agreed to by 12 Antarctic Treaty nations.

Whyte & Mackay, which owns the McKinlay brand and supplied the whisky for Shackleton, launched the bid to recover the bottles for samples to test and decide whether to relaunch the defunct spirit.

Source

In April of 2009, astronauts aboard the International Space Station photographed unusual ice rings on Lake Baikal, located in southern Siberia. The ring in question measured 2.7 miles in diameter and had everyone scratching their collective heads as to what could have caused such a formation. Speculation can now come to an end as the answer has been discovered, and no, it’s doesn’t involve a dormant UFO under the ice.

From LiveScience:

Methane emissions can create a rising mass of warm water that begins swirling in a circular pattern because of the Coriolis force, or the phenomenon caused by the Earth’s rotation that also helps create cyclones.

“Once the water mass reaches the underside of the ice on the surface of the lake, the warm water melts the ice in a ring shape,” said Marianne Moore, a marine ecologist at Wellesley College in Massachusetts who has spent much time studying Lake Baikal with Russian researchers. The lake is the largest (by volume) and deepest fresh water lake on Earth.

The latest ring patterns included a circle of thin ice with a diameter of 2.7 miles (4.4 km), although the circular patch was becoming a hole of open water. Astronauts spotted similar ice circles in both 1985 and 1994, and satellites have also made sightings over the past years.

This phenomenon is nothing new to the Russian government, which has documented circle sightings on an official Ministry of Natural Resources Web site.