From February 17th to 23rd, 21 graduate students and postdoctorate researchers from around the world made their way to Hailuoto, a small island on the coast of Finland, to spend a week learning about snow on sea-ice for the 5th Snow Science Winter School. The course, jointly organized by the Finnish Meteorological Institute and the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landsca ...[Read More]
Image of the Week — Into Iceberg Alley
Crew in hardhats and red safety gear bustle about, preparing our ship for departure. A whale spouts nearby in the Straits of Magellan, a fluke waving in brief salute, before it submerges again. Our international team of 29 scientists and 2 science communicators, led by co-Chief Scientists Mike Weber and Maureen Raymo, is boarding the JOIDES Resolution, a scientific drilling ship. We’re about to jo ...[Read More]
The hidden part of the cryosphere – Ice in caves
Fig. 1: Downloading meteorological parameters in a cave of the southeastern Alps [Credit: Renato R. Colucci (selfie)].
The cryosphere can be found in various places in many forms and shapes… in the atmosphere, on land and sea. A lesser known part of the cryosphere is hidden deep in the dark, in the cold-karstic areas of the planet: Ice caves! The ongoing climate change affecting ice all over the world is now rapidly melting these hidden ice masses as well. We therefore need to hurry up and try to collect as ...[Read More]
Image of the Week – When “Ice, Ice Baby” puts rocks “Under Pressure”
Bowie and Queen said it first, and Vanilla Ice brought it back. But now, I’ve set out to quantify it: Pressure. Rocks in glacial landscapes can experience many different kinds of pressure (forces), from sources like regional tectonics or even the weight of the glacier itself. Our hypothesis is that smaller-scale pressures, caused by the formation of ice in small bedrock cracks (frost-weathering), ...[Read More]
Image of the Week – Seven weeks in Antarctica [and how to study its surface mass balance]
After only two months of PhD at the Laboratoire de Glaciologie of the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB, Belgium), I had the chance to participate in an ice core drilling campaign in the Princess Ragnhild coastal region, East Antarctica, during seven weeks in December 2018 – January 2019 for the Mass2Ant project. Our goal was to collect ice cores to better evaluate the evolution of the surf ...[Read More]
Image of the Week – Permafrost features disappearing from subarctic peatlands
Remnants of palsa, most of which has already collapsed into surrounding pond [Credit: Mariana Verdonen].
Some of the most remarkable, marginal features of permafrost – palsas – are degrading and disappearing metre by metre from North European peatlands, and are driven close to extinction by the climate change. What are these permafrost features? A palsa is a peat mound with an icy core, which stays frozen throughout summer due to the insulating property of dry peat. These mounds can rise up to 10 met ...[Read More]
Ice-hot news: The cryosphere and the 1.5°C target
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]
Image of the Week – (Un)boxing the melting under the ice shelves
Figure 1: Melting underneath Antarctic ice shelves as modelled with the Potsdam Ice-shelf Cavity mOdel (PICO) for present-day ice geometries and ocean conditions. Extending a simple ocean box model approach (Olbers and Hellmer, 2010), it efficiently calculates the wide range of melting in Antarctica [Credit: adapted from Fig. 5 of Reese et al. (2018)]
The Antarctic ice sheet stores a large amount of water that could potentially add to sea level rise in a warming world (see this post and this post). It is currently losing ice, and the ice loss has been accelerating in the past decades. All this is linked to the melting of ice – not at the surface but at the base, underneath the so-called ice shelves which form the continuation of the Antarctic i ...[Read More]
Image of the Week – Promoting interdisciplinary science in the Arctic: what is IASC?
IASC, the International Arctic Science Committee, is more than your regular committee. IASC connects Arctic scientists from 23 member countries and countless disciplines in order to promote and support impactful multi- and interdisciplinary Arctic research. IASC aims to foster a greater scientific understanding of the Arctic region and its role in the Earth system [Credit: IASC].
The Arctic is one of the fastest changing regions on the Earth, where climate change impacts are felt both earlier and more strongly than elsewhere in the world. As an integral part of the Earth system, the Arctic is shaped by global processes, and in turn, Arctic processes influence the living conditions of hundreds of millions of people at lower latitudes. No one country or community can underst ...[Read More]
Do clouds affect melting over Antarctic ice shelves?
The Antarctic Peninsula is the ‘canary in the coalmine’ of Antarctic climate change. In the last half-century it has warmed faster than most other places on Earth, and considerable change has consequently been observed in the cryosphere, with several ice shelves collapsing in part or in full. Representing this change in models is difficult because we understand comparatively little abo ...[Read More]