In this blog post Dr Levan Tielidze from Monash University and Securing Antarctica’s Environmental Future shares insights from a new glacier assessment of Heard Island. Although rarely visited and largely unknown, Heard Island plays an outsized role in understanding how the Southern Ocean cryosphere is responding to global warming. The island is one of the …[Read More]
Mountain glaciers are melting rapidly due to global warming. This process is being intensified by increasingly extreme natural events, such as forest fires and air pollution from human activities. One of the main culprits is a tiny but powerful pollutant called black carbon (commonly known as soot) which darkens the surface of the snow and …[Read More]
Recently, Machine Learning (ML) has emerged as a powerful tool within cryospheric sciences, offering innovative and effective solutions for observing, modelling and understanding the frozen regions of the Earth. From learning snowfall patterns and predicting avalanche dynamics to speeding up the process of modelling ice sheets, ML has transformed cryospheric sciences and bears …[Read More]
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 …[Read More]
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. …[Read More]
We are visual learners after all and for many of us, creating visual content is far more out of our comfort zone than the already hard earned skills of writing itself. Still, creating an accessible image can be pivotal to not only the success of your paper, but also the reach of your science in …[Read More]
The deep Southern Ocean is full of giants! Some of them scared the sailors for centuries, like the colossal squid or, as they called it, The Kraken. They thought it was a huge monster capable of sinking ships! Far from it, these giants ran away from us, and we still know very little about them! …[Read More]
Most of the time when we speak or read about sea ice it is probably about its extent or thickness or the decline in both, or maybe even about the microorganisms living inside and underneath it. How sea ice breaks and deforms is normally not so much the topic of general discussions. This is …[Read More]
Lately permafrost makes the news more and more because of its enormous carbon stocks and its vulnerability to climate change. While permafrost greenhouse gas budget calculations are complex and harbour an ever-growing research community, its microbial ecology is still on the rise. A recent star are tiny roundworms that survived frozen in permafrost for 46’000 …[Read More]
Even as regular readers of the Cryosphere Blog , you might still be unfamiliar with the large amount of regulation that surrounds the cryosphere – and the research that’s being done on it. As effective regulation of our environment is needed, we need more scientists to understand the law and more lawyers to understand the …[Read More]
