EGU Guest blogger

The joy of collecting snow meltwater: a problem-solving hunt for meltwater in Northern Finland

Charlotte Ditlevsen April 5, 2024

Figure 1: Pallas Catchment, Finland. [Credits: Charlotte Ditlevsen]

We know that climate change is affecting many aspects of what we have considered “stable” throughout a long period of modern times. One of many impacted and changing factors is snow and thereby also snow meltwater. One way to study meltwater is to trace it by the usage of stable water isotope signals and we plan to use it by asking: Are we underestimating the portions of snow meltwater in differen ...[Read More]

Did you know? We can see what’s going on inside an ice shelf using geophysics!

Emma Pearce April 2, 2024

Figure 1: Halley VI research station, glowing in the late summer sun.

Understanding what is going on inside an ice shelf is important for many reasons. But mostly, it allows us to better understand their contribution to sea level rise, and to understand how they are changing and evolve over time, with our changing climate. Geophysical methods offer a means to be able to see inside an ice shelf, and get an idea of their properties. Read on to find out a bit more abou ...[Read More]

Did you know that a lack of Arctic shipping regulation has detrimental environmental effects?

A. Stella Ebbersmeyer February 20, 2024

Figure 1: Ship in polar waters. [Credit: 12019 from Pixabay]

Increased maritime transport in the Arctic, facilitated by the reduction in sea ice cover, is causing tremendous harm to an already vulnerable part of the world. Insufficient regulation of Arctic shipping has detrimental environmental effects on a global scale. These effects include, e.g. underwater noise pollution, oil spill risk and threats to the global climate. But did you know what role regul ...[Read More]

Ice-Hot News – You have a “cool” new Policy Point of Contact in the Cryosphere Division!

Marie Cavitte February 2, 2024

At the 2023 EGU General Assembly, our cryosphere division members all voted “YES!” to have a division policy point of contact! If you’re wondering how to engage in science policy at our division level, what a division policy officer does, who was named and what happened next… This blog post should answer a lot of these questions (or I hope)! First off, a little history about how policy officers ca ...[Read More]

A journey to the Edge of the Ice: Discovering How the Ocean Meets the Polar Sea Ice

Weixin Zhu and Lu Zhou December 12, 2023

Figure 1: Sentinel-1 image (EW swath mode) of the Marginal Ice Zone case in the Barents Sea on 2015-Feb-17. The CryoSat-2(CS2) track (black) and the retrieved alongtrack Marginal Ice Zone are shown (red). Wave-like structure is observed by Sentinel-1 (3-hr later than CS2). [Adapted from Zhu et al., 2023].

Let’s continue the journey of discovering cool facts about sea ice which started with breaking the ice. This time, we’re diving into a fascinating part of the Arctic and Antarctic: the Marginal Ice Zone (MIZ). Imagine a place where the vast, frozen world of sea ice meets the moving waters of the ocean underneath. This is the MIZ, a unique area where air, water, and ice mix and mingle. ItR ...[Read More]

Antarctica Uncovered: Exploring the Exposed Surfaces Around the Melting Continent

Evan Quinter December 4, 2023

A photo pf a rocky land with an ice mass in the background. The land has brownish plants.

Figure 1. A depicts the Hurd Glacier forefield over Sally Rocks, covered in various terrestrial organisms like lichen and mosses. B shows Livingston Island in relation to the Antarctic continent. Modified from Garrido-Benavent et al., 2020

In 2020, ocean scientists discovered a new island off the Pine Island Glacier ice shelf, naming it after the Norse goddess, Sif. The island is one of many new regions being exposed in the wake of increased ice shelf melting and glacial retreat. While these newly-revealed lands have been discussed in the Arctic and alpine ecosystems, the uncovered island and coastlines of Antarctica have been less ...[Read More]

UndercoverEisAgenten – Permafrost, drones and young explorers investigating Arctic change

Marlin M. Mueller and Josefine Lenz November 24, 2023

Figure 1: Aerial view of Aklavik Northwest Territories Canada: A serene grid-patterned settlement nestled by the Peel channel of the Mackenzie River, surrounded by autumnal wilderness. [Credit: Christian Thiel]

The “UndercoverEisAgenten” project takes us on a drone journey over the ever-changing permafrost landscapes. Initiated by the Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI) for Polar and Marine Research, the German Aerospace Center’s (DLR) Institute of Data Science, and the Heidelberg Institute for Geoinformation Technology (HeiGIT), this venture is about more than just capturing images. It̵ ...[Read More]

An exceptional year: What’s up with Antarctic sea ice?

David Docquier November 17, 2023

Figure 1: Daily cycle of the Antarctic sea-ice extent (in million km²) for each 10-year period between 1979 and 2018 (10-year averages) and for 3 separate years, including 2023 (red curve). Snapshot of 12 November 2023 [Credit: NASA., Comiso et al., “Current State of Sea Ice Cover”, see: https://earth.gsfc.nasa.gov/cryo/data/current-state-sea-ice-cover].

In our blog, we have written a lot about Arctic sea ice (see this post, this post and this post for recent examples). Much less has been written about Antarctic sea ice, i.e. its southern counterpart. That is not surprising as Arctic sea ice has experienced major losses since the late 1970s (beginning of satellite observations), while not much had happened to Antarctic sea ice (despite a small exp ...[Read More]

A ‘Ticking Bomb’: Understanding the 2023 Glacial Lake Outburst Flood (GLOF) in Sikkim Himalaya

Remya S N & Vishnu Nandan November 2, 2023

Two photos of a glacial lake, on the left in 2022 and on the right in 2013, visually smaller.

Figure 1. (a) South Lhonak lake (Cho) and associated landforms from December 2022. [Image Credit: Google Earth, and (b) A rare field photograph of the glacial lake documented in Raj et al. (2013), used with permission.

In this week’s blog post, Dr. Remya S N and Dr. Vishnu Nandan talk about how optical and radar satellite images were used to characterize the very recent catastrophic Glacial Lake Outburst Flood (GLOF) from the South Lhonak Lake in the Indian Himalaya before and after the flooding and highlight the importance of timely observations and monitoring for people’s livelihoods. The South Lhonak L ...[Read More]

Recipe to quantify calibration errors in a time-dependent ice sheet model

Beatriz Recinos, Dan Goldberg and James Maddison October 27, 2023

Figure 1: Upper diagram: schematics of baking a pie, representing an idealized 1D Bayesian inverse problem. Lower diagram: schematics of a multi-dimension ice sheet inverse problem solved using FEniCS_ice error propagation framework, created from a compilation of figures from Recinos et al. (2023). FEniCS_ice is designed to solve these problems over a finite element mesh containing (in this study case) more than 100,000 elements. These elements are the vertices, faces, and edges that form our triangular mesh (red map, check out ingredients list below for more information). [Credits: Beatriz Recinos, baking icons from https://www.flaticon.com/].

Ice sheet models are awesome tools that help us learn and predict the fate of ice sheets under human-induced climate change. However, all models have errors. What types of uncertainties exist in an ice sheet model and how can we quantify some of them efficiently? Check out our recipe to quantify one type of uncertainty in sea level rise projections: The model calibration error. Not a numerical mod ...[Read More]