Climate of the Present

Climate models and Bach’s unfinished fugue

Faranak Tootoonchi September 10, 2020

Illustration by: Roshanak Tootoonchi, M.Sc. Student in hydrology and water resources management, University of Tabriz, Iran.

Johann Sebastian Bach’s last work – Contrapunctus XIV – is an unfinished musical composition. For many years, scholars considered that this piece was left unfinished because of Bach’s deteriorating health in his final years and eventual death. However, researchers recently found evidence that Bach might have left this piece intentionally unfinished, as he thought that there was still room for impr ...[Read More]

Learning lessons from the past to inform the future

Dr Charles Williams August 21, 2020

1.5 m air temperature climatology differences, Pliocene simulation from the UK’s physical climate model, relative to the preindustrial era.

A fairly recent blog post here reiterated the compelling comparison between the current COVID-19 crisis and the ongoing climate emergency, focusing on extreme events such as hurricanes, heatwaves and severe rainfall-related flooding, all of which are likely to get worse as the climate warms (Langendijk & Osman 2020). This comparison has been made by us Climate Scientists since the COVI ...[Read More]

Breathing life into a d(r)ying lake in northwest Iran

P. Saemian ^a, O. Elmi ^a, B.D. Vishwakarma ^b, M.J. Tourian ^a, N. Sneeuw ^a
^aUniversity of Stuttgart, Institute of Geodesy (GIS), Germany
^bBristol Glaciology Center, School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol, UK
August 6, 2020

Figure 1: (a) A ship about forty meters long lies stuck on a salty sandbank right in the center of Lake Urmia (photographed by Sebastian Castelier). (b) The same ship this time floats on the water after nearly 20 years.

Lake Urmia, in Northwest Iran, was once the most extensive and permanent hypersaline lake (salinity >> of ocean) in the world. Since 1995, the lake water level has dropped about 8 m, shrinking to less than 30% of its original surface area and losing more than 90% of its water volume over two decades [1]. Unsustainable water management in response to increasing demand together with climatic e ...[Read More]

Glacier retreat and music

Hans Oerlemans¹ and Felix Keller²
¹Utrecht University (The Netherlands) and Technical University of Graubünden (Switzerland); correspondence: j.oerlemans@uu.nl ²Technical University of Graubünden and Academia Engiadina (Switzerland)
July 20, 2020

Photograph of the Pers glacier (left) and Morteratsch glacier (right) in Switzerland. You can also see Piz Bernina (4049 m) on the right side and a small glacier with fleece cover on the left (Diavolezza firn). Photocredits: Christine Levy (Academia Engiadina), who took the photo on 1st August 2017 from a glider.

In virtually all parts of the world glaciers are retreating, and this is often considered to be one of the clearest signs of global warming (e.g. Leclercq and J Oerlemans, 2011). Glaciers started to shrink in the second half of the 19th century and, apart from some minor interruptions, this development has continued until today. Over the past hundred years glacier melt has made a significant contr ...[Read More]