CR
Cryospheric Sciences

Editor post

Image of The Week – 100 years of Endurance!

August 26, 2016
Image of The Week – 100 years of Endurance!
Shakleton's Endurance finally sinks to the bottom of the Weddell sea in November 1915. [Credit: Royal Geographical Society via Wikimedia Commons]

The 30th August 2016 marks 100 years since the successful rescue of all (human) member of Shackleton’s Endurance crew from their temporary camp on Elephant Island (see map). Nearly a year prior to their rescue they were forced to abandon their ship – The Endurance – after it became stuck in thick drifting sea ice, known as pack ice, trying to navigate the Weddell Sea. It was the last major e ...[Read More]

Image of the Week — Where do people stay in the “coolest” place on earth?

August 19, 2016
Image of the Week — Where do people stay in the “coolest” place on earth?
The 82 research stations in the Antarctic. The world map below shows which countries are operating a station in Antarctica. Source: COMNAP Antarctic Facilities (Updated February 2014) - [Credit: Sophie Berger]. Click here here to enlarge the image.

What word would you use to characterise the Antarctic ? White? Windy? Remote? Empty? Inhospitable? Wild? Preserved? While all of these are true it may surprise you to find out that the Antarctic is occupied by humans all year round with almost half of its 82 research stations operating 365.25 days a year! Just a few hours before the launch of the biennial Antarctic meeting held by the Science Comm ...[Read More]

Image of the Week — Arctic porthole, Arctic portal

July 15, 2016
Image of the Week — Arctic porthole, Arctic portal
Isfjorden, Svalbard, through the porthole of a boat, June 2012 [Credit: Dr Fabien Darrouzet (imaggeo )]

No need to be a superhero to momentarily escape your everyday life! For that you, can just rely on the EGU Cryosphere Blog, which cares for taking you on trips to all sorts of remote and cool places (OK, OK we have to admit that some of these places are indisputably cold 🙂). The picture of this week was taken through the porthole of a boat in the middle of Isfjorden, one of the largest fjord in Sv ...[Read More]

Image of the Week – Mushrooms at zero degrees = hair ice?!

June 3, 2016
Image of the Week – Mushrooms at zero degrees = hair ice?!
Hair ice in a forest near Moosseedorf, Switzerland (Credit: Christian Mätzler)

  When you go down to the woods today you’re in for a big surprise….. hair ice!  Did you know that there is a type of ice called hair ice? It is shaped like fine, silky hairs and looks like white candy floss. It grows on the rotten branches of broad-leaf trees during humid winter nights when the air temperature drops slightly below 0°C. A 100-year-old theory states that hair ice a ...[Read More]

Image of The Week – Tumbling Rocks

May 20, 2016
Image of The Week – Tumbling Rocks
A 15,000 m³ rockfall during the 2015 summer heat wave at Tour de Ronde summit, Mont Blanc Massif. (Photo credit: Ludovic Ravanel.)

This photo captures a rockfall at the summit of Tour de Ronde, 3792 m above sea level in the Mont Blanc Massif. On 27 August 2015, around 15000 m3  of rock fell from the steep walls of the mountain. Why do mountains crumble ? Rockfalls such as the one on the photo have been linked to thawing permafrost. The exact mechanism that leads to these events is not fully understood, however, it is thought ...[Read More]

Image of the Week – See How Seasonal Sea Ice Decline Differs!

May 13, 2016
Image of the Week – See How Seasonal Sea Ice Decline Differs!
Figure 1: Arctic sea-ice area (75°N to 90°N) VS global annual mean surface air temperature for the complex model MPI-ESM-LR. Red dots represent a seasonal average over autumn (September/October/November) and blue dots over spring (March/April/May) of a particular year in the historical and future (RCP8.5) simulations. The dotted black lines result from a linear orthogonal regression in the ice area regime with the steepest change (Credit: subset of fig 2 from Bathiany et al, 2016 ).

Why do we care about sea ice in the first place? Sea ice is important for several components of the climate system. Due to its high albedo, sea ice reflects a high amount of the incoming solar radiation and is therefore relevant for the Earth’s energy budget. Sea ice inhibits the exchange of heat, moisture and momentum between ocean and atmosphere, which usually occur at the sea surface. Whe ...[Read More]

Image of the Week — Glowing Ice

May 6, 2016
Image of the Week — Glowing Ice
Glowing ice -- winning picture of the EGU photo contest 2016. The image shows a block of ice on the shores of Jökulsárlón, Iceland. [credit: Katharine Cashman (distributed via imaggeo.egu.eu)]

Two weeks ago, the EGU General Assembly was coming to an end in Vienna. With over 16,500 participants, this year’s edition was bigger and more varied than ever (e.g check out this good overview of the science-policy short course, published 2 days ago on geolog). The week was particularly fruitful for the cryospheric sciences and to mark this we have cherry-picked one of the winning picture o ...[Read More]

Image of The Week – EGU General Assembly 2016

April 22, 2016
Image of The Week – EGU General Assembly 2016
The sun sets over the Austria Center Vienna (ACV), where the 2016 EGU General Assembly is being held this week. Photo Credit: Nanna B. Karlsson.

The EGU General Assembly, which takes place each year in Vienna, Austria, draws to a close today.  Attended by nearly 13,650 participants from 111 countries, with around a third of those being students – a great turn-out for this vital part of the early career scientists (ECS) community! It has been a very productive meeting for the cryosphere division with a huge number and variety of oral ...[Read More]

Image of The Week – The Ice Your Eyes Can’t See!

April 15, 2016
Image of The Week – The Ice Your Eyes Can’t See!
Figure 1: Soil carbon map of the Northern Hemisphere, averaged over top 3 m. Produced using the SiBCASA model, initialised with with spatially varying permafrost carbon density from the NCSCDv2 data set (Figure 6b from Jafarov and Schaefer, 2016 ) .

Ice sheets and glaciers are very visible and much photographed (e.g. here) elements of the Cryosphere but what about the vast, invisible and buried parts?  Around a quarter of the land in the Northern hemisphere remains frozen year round, making up a hugely important part of the cryosphere known as permafrost. Permafrost largely exists at high latitudes (e.g. Siberia and the Canadian Arctic) and t ...[Read More]

Image of the Week: The Bipolar Seesaw

April 8, 2016
Image of the Week: The Bipolar Seesaw
Ice core records from the WAIS core showing fast millennial-scale climatic variability. Reprinted by permission from Macmillan (Publishers Ltd: Nature, WAIS Divide Project Members, 2015, vol. 520).

The colourful graphs above show how the climate changed in the period from 65 to 25 thousand years ago when Earth was experiencing an ice age. A wealth of information on the dynamics of our climate is embedded in the curves, especially how the northern and southern hemisphere interact, and how fast climate can change. The figure represents thousands and thousands of hours of work by scientists, te ...[Read More]