Remains of the first airplane ever taken to Antarctica, in 1912, have been found by Australian researchers, the team announced.

The Mawson’s Huts Foundation had been searching for the plane for three summers before stumbling upon metal pieces of it on New Year’s Day.

“The biggest news of the day is that we’ve found the air tractor, or at least parts of it!” team member Tony Stewart wrote on the team’s blog from Cape Denison in Antarctica’s Commonwealth Bay.

Australian polar explorer and geologist Douglas Mawson led two expeditions to Antarctica in the early 1900s, on the first one bringing along a single-propeller Vickers plane. The wings of the plane, built in 1911, had been damaged in a crash before the expedition, but Mawson hoped to use it as a kind of motorized sled.

Stewart said the 1911-14 Australian Antarctic Expedition used the plane to tow gear onto the ice in preparation for their sledging journeys.

But the plane’s engine could not withstand the extreme temperatures and it was eventually abandoned.

The plane, the first from Britain’s Vickers factory, had not been seen since the mid-1970s, when researchers photographed the steel fuselage nearly encompassed in ice.

The foundation — which works at Cape Denison to conserve the huts used by Mawson in his expeditions — believed the plane would still be where it was left by Mawson, near the huts and the harbor, which is covered in ice for most of the year.

AP

One of the biggest glaciers in the southern hemisphere shrivelled by a fifth in 40 years.

The Cook glacier on Kerguelen, an island in France’s southern Indian Ocean territories, covered 501 square kilometres (193 square miles) in 1963.

Combining satellite images with other data, glaciologists from the Laboratory for Studying Geophysics and Space Oceanography estimate the glacier lost an average of nearly 1.5 metres (4.9 feet) in height each year by 2003, shedding almost 22 percent of its original volume.

In terms of area, the glacier shrank by 1.9 sq. kms. (0.74 sq. miles) per year from 1963 to 1991.

Thereafter the loss doubled, to 3.8 sq. kms (1.48 sq. miles) per year. By 2003, the glacier covered only 403 sq. kms (155 sq. miles), a retreat of 20 percent compared with 1963.

The study has been accepted by a US publication, the Journal of Geophysical Research.

It says Cook’s early shrinkage could be attributed in part to the residual effect of natural warming that ocurred after the “Little Ice Age” that ended in the late 19th century.

But the post-1991 warming is linked more to higher temperatures and low precipitation that began to occur in the early 1980s.

This is also a period when man-made carbon emissions started to soar and the Southern Ocean that girdles Antarctica showed perceptible warming.

Other studies in Patagonia, South Georgia and Heard Island have also suggested that warmer seas are leading to “strong and accelerated wastage” of glaciers on the fringes of Antarctica, the paper says.

(Agencies)