Image of the Week – Cryo Connect presents: The top 50 media-covered cryosphere papers of 2018

Discover which cryospheric research articles were most successful in attracting media attention in 2018 according to the Altmetric score.

Cryo Connect and Altmetric

Scientists are generally aware of each others’ studies. But when a scientific study generates media interest, its impact can be boosted beyond the scientific community. The media can push the essence of scientific study to the broader public through newspapers and news websites, television and social media. It all counts, and Altmetric tracks mentions of scientific studies across many media outlets. 

Cryo Connect is all about boosting outreach communication in cryospheric sciences, and developing a joint AGU- and EGU-endorsed community outreach platform for cryospheric researchers. So we comb through Altmetric data each year to see which cryospheric studies are garnering top media coverage. Visit https://CryoConnect.net to learn how to help boost your cryospheric research, or simply tag @CryoConnect on Twitter.

The colors of the Altmetric badges represent the different types of media coverage.

Cryospheric Top 50

What does the top 3 look like?
A Nature study that developed a consensus estimate of the mass balance of the Antarctic Ice Sheet garnered the most attention of any cryosphere study in 2018. This study was authored by the 80-author “IMBIE”, or Ice Sheet Mass Balance Inter-comparison Exercise, team. The second most media-featured cryosphere study of 2018 was a Science Advances study, which described an impact crater beneath the Hiawatha Glacier in Northwest Greenland, by Kurt Kjaer and 22 colleagues. The third most media-featured study of 2018 was a Nature study that documented a non-linear increase in meltwater runoff from the Greenland Ice Sheet since the industrial revolution, by Luke Tusel and eight colleagues.

The five most popular scientific journals of the top-50 list are: Nature Communications (9 studies), Geophysical Research Letters (8 studies), Nature (6 studies), and Science Advances and Nature Geoscience (5 studies each). Together, these five journals published two-thirds of the 50-top cryospheric science studies. Perhaps interestingly, Nature Communications and Science Advances are both relatively new journals — both less than eight years old — that provide gold open-access venues. Both EGU (The Cryosphere) and AGU (Geophysical Research Letters) journals are featured on the top-50 list.

There is a notable year-on-year increase in Altmetric scores comprising the top-50 list. At the low end, the rank #50 cut-off Altmetric score increased from 201 in 2017 to 293 in the 2018 list presented here. At the high end, the rank #1 Altmetric score increased from 1330 in 2017 to 3379 in 2018. Overall, the average top-50 Altmetric score increased from 442 in 2017 to 744 in 2018. We used the same methodology, described below, to generate the 2017 and 2018 top-50 lists.

It is difficult to precisely explain this year-on-year increase in Altmetric scores within the cryospheric sciences. There could be an increasing trend in cryosphere science coverage in the media, or improved detection of media coverage by Altmetric, or perhaps 2018 just had an unusually strong batch of cryospheric studies published. In any case, we congratulate all the authors of 2018’s top media-covered cryospheric studies on the well-deserved media attention that they have received, and the exposure they have given to cryospheric science!

Rank	Altmetric Score	Publication title	Journal
1		Mass balance of the Antarctic Ice Sheet from 1992 to 2017	Nature
2		A large impact crater beneath Hiawatha Glacier in northwest Greenland	Science Advances
3		Nonlinear rise in Greenland runoff in response to post-industrial Arctic warming	Nature
4		Viable nematodes from late Pleistocene permafrost of the Kolyma River Lowland, Doklady	Biological Sciences
5		Arctic sea ice is an important temporal sink and means of transport for microplastic	Nature Communications
6		Exposed subsurface ice sheets in the Martian mid-latitudes	Science
7		Direct evidence of surface exposed water ice in the lunar polar regions	Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
8		Warm Arctic episodes linked with increased frequency of extreme winter weather in the United States	Nature Communications
9		Net retreat of Antarctic glacier grounding lines	Nature Geoscience
10		The Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets under 1.5 °C global warming	Nature Climate Change
11		Trends and connections across the Antarctic cryosphere	Nature
12		Permafrost stores a globally significant amount of mercury	Geophysical Research Letters
13		Near-surface environmentally forced changes in the Ross Ice Shelf observed with ambient seismic noise	Geophysical Research Letters
14		Reduced probability of ice-free summers for 1.5 °C compared to 2 °C warming	Nature Climate Change
15		21st-century modeled permafrost carbon emissions accelerated by abrupt thaw beneath lakes	Nature Communications
16		Observed rapid bedrock uplift in Amundsen Sea Embayment promotes ice-sheet stability	Science
17		Formation of metre-scale bladed roughness on Europa’s surface by ablation of ice	Nature Geoscience
18		On the propagation of acoustic–gravity waves under elastic ice sheets	Journal of Fluid Mechanics
19		The influence of Arctic amplification on mid-latitude summer circulation	Nature Communications
20		Topographic steering of enhanced ice flow at the bottleneck between East and West Antarctica	Geophysical Research Letters
21		Warming of the interior Arctic Ocean linked to sea ice losses at the basin margins	Science Advances
22		Evidence of an active volcanic heat source beneath the Pine Island Glacier	Nature Communications
23		Experimental evidence for superionic water ice using shock compression	Nature Physics
24		Variation in rising limb of Colorado River snowmelt runoff hydrograph controlled by dust radiative forcing in snow	Geophysical Research Letters
25		Vulnerability of Arctic marine mammals to vessel traffic in the increasingly ice-free Northwest Passage and Northern Sea Route	Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
26		Stopping the flood: could we use targeted geoengineering to mitigate sea level rise?	The Cryosphere
27		Limited influence of climate change mitigation on short-term glacier mass loss	Nature Climate Change
28		Degrading permafrost puts Arctic infrastructure at risk by mid-century	Nature Communications
29		Seismology gets under the skin of the Antarctic Ice Sheet	Geophysical Research Letters
30		Dark zone of the Greenland Ice Sheet controlled by distributed biologically-active impurities	Nature Communications
31		Freshening by glacial meltwater enhances melting of ice shelves and reduces formation of Antarctic Bottom Water	Science Advances
32		Ice core records of west Greenland melt and climate forcing	Geophysical Research Letters
33		Arctic warming hotspot in the northern Barents Sea linked to declining sea-ice import	Nature Climate Change
34		Path-dependent reductions in CO2 emission budgets caused by permafrost carbon release	Nature Geoscience
35		Discovery of a hypersaline subglacial lake complex beneath Devon Ice Cap, Canadian Arctic	Science Advances
36		Cascading lake drainage on the Greenland Ice Sheet triggered by tensile shock and fracture	Nature Communications
37		Global sea-level contribution from Arctic land ice: 1971–2017	Environmental Research Letters
38		Discovery of moganite in a lunar meteorite as a trace of H2O ice in the Moon’s regolith	Science Advances
39		The world’s largest High Arctic lake responds rapidly to climate warming	Nature Communications
40		Mass loss of Totten and Moscow University Glaciers, East Antarctica, using regionally optimized GRACE mascons	Geophysical Research Letters
41		A 400-Year ice core melt layer record of summertime warming in the Alaska Range	Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres
42		What drives 20th century polar motion?	Earth & Planetary Science Letters
43		Response of Pacific-sector Antarctic ice shelves to the El Niño/Southern Oscillation	Nature Geoscience
44		Dynamic response of Antarctic Peninsula Ice Sheet to potential collapse of Larsen C and George VI ice shelves	The Cryosphere
45		Increased West Antarctic and unchanged East Antarctic ice discharge over the last 7 years	The Cryosphere
46		Change in future climate due to Antarctic meltwater	Nature
47		Antarctic ice shelf disintegration triggered by sea ice loss and ocean swell	Nature
48		Heterogeneous and rapid ice loss over the Patagonian Ice Fields revealed by CryoSat-2 swath radar altimetry	Remote Sensing of Environment
49		Persistent polar ocean warming in a strategically geoengineered climate	Nature Geoscience
50		Ice loss from the East Antarctic Ice Sheet during late Pleistocene interglacials	Nature

Methodology

This top-50 cryospheric articles list was compiled using access to the Altmetric Explorer database provided by Altmetric. Similar to the 2017 top-50 list of cryospheric studies, we searched Altmetric Explorer for all peer-reviewed articles published between 1 January and 31 December 2018 that were within the field-of-research codes for Atmospheric Science (0401), Geochemistry (0402), Geology (0403), Geophysics (0404), Physical Geography and Environmental Science (0406), Environmental Science and Management (0502), Soil Sciences (0503) or Other Environmental Sciences (0599). We further limited qualifying articles to those with keywords of Antarctic, Arctic, Cryosphere, Firn, Frozen, Glacier, Glaciology, Ice, Iceberg, Permafrost, Polar and Snow.

The resulting articles were then ranked by Altmetric score. The Altmetric scores shown here are characteristic of 29 March 2019, and will tend to grow over time with subsequent media coverage. Please contact info@cryoconnect.net if you have questions about methodology or oversights.

This is a joint post, published together with Cryo Connect.

Edited by Sophie Berger and Violaine Coulon

Cryo Connect is an initiative run by Dirk van As, Faezeh Nick, William Colgan and Inka Koch.