Is it possible to eat a creamy rice dish with artichokes, squid, and bacon among whales and glaciers, more than 1,000 km from civilization? Well, yes. And that's what the young chef from Girona, Clara Canyigueral, is doing. For the second year in a row, she has embarked as a cook on a scientific expedition to... Antarctica with the mission of preparing meals every day for some forty CSIC professionals.

Oceanographer and biologist Josefina Castellví passed away this Monday in Barcelona. Born in Barcelona in 1935, Castellví—or Pepita, as many knew her—was the first woman in the world to direct a permanent station in Antarctica. Throughout her long career, the Catalan researcher received such distinguished awards as the Gold Medal of the Generalitat of Catalonia for her academic and social contributions in 2021. Strong-willed and visionary, Castellví chose oceanography during her studies at Marenda University. At that time, the discipline was still relatively new, although the first institutions and facilities dedicated to it already existed. She was a pioneer in introducing the discipline and, most notably, Antarctic studies.

The rate of Antarctic ice melt continues to surprise scientists. In an article published this Monday in Nature GeoscienceResearchers at the University of Colorado Boulder (United States) have found that in 2023 the Hektoria Glacier, located on the eastern coast of the Graham Peninsula—one of the fastest-warming areas of the Antarctic continent—receded at least 8 kilometers in just two months. Although this ice mass already experienced very rapid ice loss in the 2000s, the rate recorded by this team is the fastest in modern history. The acceleration of the melting was ten times more powerful than previous measurements, to the point that almost half of the glacier disintegrated in just a few weeks.

French filmmaker Luc Jacquet (Bourg-en-Bresse, 1967) won an Oscar for The Emperor's Journey (2005), a documentary about the journey emperor penguins take to reproduce. Following that experience, he launched a new adventure in 2019 with Icebreaker Studios and began using other narratives to explain what life is like in Antarctica. Jacquet, who has spent more than three years on the frozen continent, is showing visual and audio recordings of his latest expedition in the Cúpula Arenas de Barcelona, in the form of an immersive exhibition.