The cryosphere blog is taking a summer break but not without first providing you with your beach/airplane/train/fieldwork/balcony summer reading list to make you miss us a tiny bit less. Continue reading this post to explore some summer inspiration. Like a lot of northern countries who take long summer breaks to enjoy the long hours of light (midnight sun) after a dark winter, the Cryoblog is also ...[Read More]
After two years of great work, our current cryosphere division ECS representative TJ Young is passing on the task of representing the needs and wishes of the cryosphere division early career scientists (ECS). As they make up a majority of the EGU members, their representatives make sure to see their needs and voices heard. You might know that the EGU ECS community is represented by two union-level ...[Read More]
So this is the last post in 2022 for our blog. We have decided that this time, the topic will not be another exciting story about the science of ice and cold in their various forms. This time we are talking about the blog itself, so a kind of meta-post to take stock and understand a little better how our blog works, what it is about, and who our main authors are. To this purpose, we asked all the ...[Read More]
Are you starting your studies in cryospheric sciences, or are coming into our field from another subject? If so, you may have unsuspectingly waded into a (very thick) soup of acronyms! Don’t fret–here is your “one stop shop” that tells you where to look for more information! Early Career Organisations Unless you’re fortunate enough to be working in a polar-oriented institute (some of our previous ...[Read More]
At the beginning of March, just over a month ago, sea ice in the Arctic reached its annual maximum extent. As currently all media attention is focused on other news, you might have missed that, once again, this maximum fell below the 1981 to 2010 average maximum extent. When reading headlines about such sea-ice facts, you may have been confused by the seemingly interchangeable use of “sea-ice exte ...[Read More]
Ice is a viscous fluid: it flows but slowly, reaching up to 100 m/yr for the fastest flowing ice. That’s 0.00001 km/hr, so you’d never see it with the naked eye. But what influences the morphology of the glaciers is the shape of the topography that lies underneath them. Elephant Foot Glacier, shown above, aptly named for its shape, is a textbook-example of a piedmont glacier. These types of glacie ...[Read More]
As Christmas gets closer, days are getting shorter in the northern hemisphere. A good excuse to get cosy inside on the sofa, drinking tea and eating Christmas biscuits. Meanwhile, a few thousand of scientists are heading “South”, to Antarctica, where the lengthening days provide the perfect conditions to conduct a whole variety of scientific field expeditions… Science in Antarctica Just last ...[Read More]
Global sea level is rising and will continue to do so over the next century, as has once again been shown in the recent IPCC special report on 1.5°C. But did you know that, in some places of our planet, local sea level is actually falling, and this due to rising of the continent itself?! Where is this happening? In places where huge ice sheets used to cover the land surface during the last ...[Read More]
Every year again, the Conference of Parties takes place, an event where politicians and activists from all over the world meet for two weeks to discuss further actions concerning climate change. In the context the COP24, which started this Monday in Katowice (Poland), let’s revisit an important decision made three years ago, during the COP21 in Paris, and its consequences for the state of the cryo ...[Read More]
Many polar scientists who have traveled to Svalbard have heard several times how most of the stuff there is the “northernmost” stuff, e.g. the northernmost university, the northernmost brewery, etc. Despite hosting the four northernmost cities and towns, Svalbard is however accessible easily by “usual-sized” planes at least once per day from Oslo and Tromsø. This is not the case for th ...[Read More]
