EGU Guest blogger

Image of the Week – Ice Stupas: a solution for Himalayan water shortage?

Suryanarayanan Balasubramanian November 17, 2017

Ice cones in the high altitude deserts of Ladakh, Himalayas. [Credit: Dadul Lobzang, Ice Stupa Project]

As the world searches for practical innovations that can mitigate the impact of climate change, traditional methods of environmental management can offer inspiration. In Hindu Kush and Karakoram region, local people have been growing, or grafting, glaciers for at least 100 years. Legend has it that artificial glaciers were grown in mountain passes as early as the twelfth century to block the advan ...[Read More]

Back to the Front – Larsen C Ice Shelf in the Aftermath of Iceberg A68!

Adam Booth November 8, 2017

Figure 1: A68 sets sail from Larsen C.
Sentinel 1 SAR image [Credit: Adrian Luckman, Swansea University].

Much of the Antarctic continent is fringed by ice shelves. An ice shelf is the floating extension of a terrestrial ice mass and, as such, is an important ‘middleman’ that regulates the delivery of ice from land into the ocean: for much of Antarctica, ice that passes from land into the sea does so via ice shelves. I’ve been conducting geophysical experiments on ice for over a decade, using mostly s ...[Read More]

Image of the Week – Sea-ice dynamics for beginners

Polona Itkin November 3, 2017

A block of ice in a pressure ridge. The scientist has to cross the ridge with equipment to continue measuring the sea-ice thickness on the other side. [Credit: Marius Bratrein, Norwegian Polar Institute]

When I ask school children or people who only know about sea ice from remote references in the newspapers: ‘How thick do you think is the Arctic sea ice?’, I often get surprising answers: ’10 meters? No, it must be thicker – 100 meters!’. It seems like sea ice, often depicted as a uniform white cover around the North Pole and as a key element in accelerated warming of the Polar Regions, imposes a ...[Read More]

Image of the Week – Of comparing oranges and apples in the sea-ice context

David Docquier October 27, 2017

Fig. 1: Model-to-observation comparison of sea-ice variables might best be conducted at a middle-ground "location" (along the x axis) somewhere in between what the models compute (left) and what satellites observe at the top of the atmosphere (right). Obs Oper = Observation Operators, SIC = sea-ice concentration, ISF = ice surface fraction [Credit: Lavergne, 2017 ].

In the last fifty years, models and observations have enabled us to better understand sea-ice processes. On the one hand, global climate models have been developed, accounting for the sea-ice component in the climate system. On the other hand, satellite instruments have been developed to monitor the “real” sea-ice evolution. These satellite observations are often used to evaluate climate models. H ...[Read More]

Image of the Week – Karthaus Summer School 2017

Dorota Medrzycka October 13, 2017

Glaciologists often undertake fieldwork in remote and difficult to access locations, which perhaps explains why they happily travel to similar locations to attend meetings and workshops. The Karthaus Summer School, which focuses on Ice Sheets and Glaciers in the Climate System, is no exception. The idyllic village of Karthaus, located in the narrow Schnalstal valley in Südtirol (Italy), has been h ...[Read More]

Mapping the bottom of the world — an Interview with Brad Herried, Antarctic Cartographer

Brad Herried October 11, 2017

Brad Herried, Antarctic cartographer at South Pole. [Credit: Brad Herried].

Mapping Earth’s most remote continent presents a number of unique challenges. Antarctic cartographers and scientists are using some of the most advanced mapping technologies available to get a clearer picture of the continent. We asked Brad Herried, a Cartographer and Web Developer at the Polar Geospatial Center at the University of Minnesota, a few questions about what it’s like to do this unique ...[Read More]

Image of the Week: Petermann Glacier

Laurence Dyke September 29, 2017

Our image of the week shows the area around the calving front of Petermann Glacier through the spring, summer, and autumn of 2016. Petermann Glacier, in northern Greenland, is one of the largest glaciers of the Greenland Ice Sheet. It terminates in the huge Petermann Fjord, more than 10 km wide, surrounded by 1000 m cliffs and plunging to more than 1100 m below sea level at its deepest point. In 2 ...[Read More]

Image of the Week – Powering up the ground in the search for ice

Laura Helene Rasmussen September 22, 2017

In an earlier post, we talked briefly about below-ground ice and the consequences of its disappearing. However, to estimate the consequences of disappearing ground ice, one has to know that there actually is ice in the area of study. How much ice is there – and where is it? As the name suggests, below-ground ice is not so easy to spot with the naked eye. Using geophysical methods, however, ...[Read More]

Image of the Week – Bioalbedo: algae darken the Greenland Ice Sheet

Joseph Cook September 8, 2017

Fig 1: This aerial image shows the surprisingly dark grey-brown colour of the Greenland Ice Sheet surface, around the ‘Black and Bloom’ camp. [Credit: 'Black and Bloom']

Most of the energy that drives glacier melting comes directly from sunlight, with the amount of melting critically dependent on the amount of solar energy absorbed compared to that reflected back into the atmosphere. The amount of solar energy that is reflected by a surface without being absorbed is called the albedo. A low albedo surface absorbs more of the energy that hits it compared to a high ...[Read More]

Image of the week – Learning from our past!

David Rounce September 1, 2017

Figure 1: Peak global mean temperature, atmospheric CO2, maximum global mean sea level (GMSL) and source(s) of meltwater over the past 3 million years. The light blue area on each bar indicates the uncertainty associated with the maximum global mean sea level , and the pie charts denote the fraction (not location) of ice retreat in Greenland and Antarctica [Credit: Dutton et al. (2015)].

Understanding the climate evolution of our planet is not an easy task, but it is essential to understand the past if we are to predict the future! Historic climate cycles provide us with a glimpse into a period of time when the Earth was warmer than it was today. Our image of the week looks at these warmer periods of time to see what they can tell us about the future! For example, during the Plioc ...[Read More]