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Cryospheric Sciences

Ice-hot news

World Mental Health Day 2024 with a focus on workplace

October 16, 2024
World Mental Health Day 2024 with a focus on workplace
Maintaining mental wellness in academia is not always easy and steered by many external factors. Image by Mohamed Hassan from Pixabay.

Friday the 10 October, was World Mental Health Day, a day that was founded by the World Federation for Mental Health (WFMH) in 1992. This year’s official theme focuses specifically on mental health in the work environment. So let’s take a look at what this means for the field of academia and the cryosphere specifically. With this post, we aim to not only raise awareness of the mental health crisis ...[Read More]

Cryoscientist life stories – an interview with our incoming deputy division president, Daniel Farinotti

May 31, 2024
A profile image of a white man with beard, shirt and pullover in front of a glacier landscape.
Credit: Daniel Farinotti & Anita Raimondi (distributed via imaggeo.egu.eu)

We would like to introduce Daniel Farinotti to you, our Cryosphere Division incoming deputy president, who will take over as division president from 2025-2027. For that, our Cryosphere Division outreach officer, Larissa van der Laan, interviewed Daniel at the EGU General Assembly in April 2024, to ask him a few questions about himself and his view of this exciting role within the EGU. Larissa: Hi ...[Read More]

You thought it was over? Here’s more on the 2023 Antarctic sea-ice extent record low

and April 26, 2024
A figure showing several lines for several years of sea ice extent. They look like a wave with the minimum around february each year and the maximum around october.
Figure 1: Daily cycle of the Antarctic sea-ice extent (in million km²) for separate years featuring record lows (2017, 2022, 2023, 2024) and a record high (2014), and for the average over the 1979-2014 period. The blue shading indicates the interannual variability (2 standard deviations) around the 1979-2014 mean [Credit: D. Docquier, based on the OSI SAF sea-ice index, last access: 24/04/2024]. The map in the lower right corner shows the Antarctic Ice Sheet, as well as Antarctic sea ice surrounding it, in September 2005 [Credit: Wikimedia Commons, NASA Earth Observatory].

  In November last year (see this post), we promised to provide you an update of what happened with Antarctic sea ice during the year 2023 – a year of an exceptionally low extent. In this post, we try our best to discuss the conditions that lead to (part of) the recent loss in Antarctic sea ice, including atmospheric and ocean processes. How sea ice usually works… One of the ways scientists h ...[Read More]

Ice-Hot News – You have a “cool” new Policy Point of Contact in the Cryosphere Division!

February 2, 2024
Ice-Hot News – You have a “cool” new Policy Point of Contact in the Cryosphere Division!

At the 2023 EGU General Assembly, our cryosphere division members all voted “YES!” to have a division policy point of contact! If you’re wondering how to engage in science policy at our division level, what a division policy officer does, who was named and what happened next… This blog post should answer a lot of these questions (or I hope)! First off, a little history about how policy officers ca ...[Read More]

An exceptional year: What’s up with Antarctic sea ice?

November 17, 2023
An exceptional year: What’s up with Antarctic sea ice?
Figure 1: Daily cycle of the Antarctic sea-ice extent (in million km²) for each 10-year period between 1979 and 2018 (10-year averages) and for 3 separate years, including 2023 (red curve). Snapshot of 12 November 2023 [Credit: NASA., Comiso et al., “Current State of Sea Ice Cover”, see: https://earth.gsfc.nasa.gov/cryo/data/current-state-sea-ice-cover].

In our blog, we have written a lot about Arctic sea ice (see this post, this post and this post for recent examples). Much less has been written about Antarctic sea ice, i.e. its southern counterpart. That is not surprising as Arctic sea ice has experienced major losses since the late 1970s (beginning of satellite observations), while not much had happened to Antarctic sea ice (despite a small exp ...[Read More]

A ‘Ticking Bomb’: Understanding the 2023 Glacial Lake Outburst Flood (GLOF) in Sikkim Himalaya

November 2, 2023
Two photos of a glacial lake, on the left in 2022 and on the right in 2013, visually smaller.
Figure 1. (a) South Lhonak lake (Cho) and associated landforms from December 2022. [Image Credit: Google Earth, and (b) A rare field photograph of the glacial lake documented in Raj et al. (2013), used with permission.

  In this week’s blog post, Dr. Remya S N and Dr. Vishnu Nandan talk about how optical and radar satellite images were used to characterize the very recent catastrophic Glacial Lake Outburst Flood (GLOF) from the South Lhonak Lake in the Indian Himalaya before and after the flooding and highlight the importance of timely observations and monitoring for people’s livelihoods. The South Lhonak L ...[Read More]

CryoNews – The WMO is making the cryosphere a global priority

June 9, 2023
A plane and several researchers on the ice in Antarctica.
The collection and sharing of climate data especially from Antarctic is now more than ever supported by the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO). (Photo credit: Andrew Elvidge, distributed via imaggeo.egu.eu)

To us, the cryosphere has always been a priority. It is our field of interest, research, maybe passion, it is the stuff that gets us excited. Now, the cryosphere also became a priority to the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO). In today’s post we cover a recent news item introducing this very decision made during WMO’s recent congress. Read along to find out  why they emphasize the importance ...[Read More]

The more the merrier – Interview with the two new Cryo ECS representatives

April 28, 2023
A women on the left in front of a glacier face and a women on the right on front of a city landscape.
Your new EGU Cryo ECS representatives for 2023 - 2025: left: Ann-Sofie Zinck, right: Lu Zhou.

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]

Lights out: cryosphere instruments perfectly placed to study solar eclipse

July 8, 2022
Lights out: cryosphere instruments perfectly placed to study solar eclipse
The view from the path of totality in West Antarctica during the eclipse. Photo credit: Jesse Norquay, accessed from https://antarcticsun.usap.gov/science/4712/

On 04 December 2021, only a handful of people in Antarctica were fortunate enough to experience a total eclipse. As well as spectacular views—including a brief window of totality that darkened the midnight sun for 2 minutes—this phenomenon is known to affect the flow of energy between the Northern and Southern hemispheres of the ionosphere. Because eclipses in Antarctica only happen once every ~20 ...[Read More]

Ice-hot news: A cryo-summary of the new IPCC assessment report!

May 13, 2022
Ice-hot news: A cryo-summary of the new IPCC assessment report!
Figure 1: An illustration of the Vernagtferner glacier in Austria, under the influence of climate change. Painting by Larissa van der Laan, based on historical photographs compiled by Markus Weber.

We have waited eight years for it, and it is finally out: the 6th Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (a.k.a. « IPCC AR6 »)! And it is more than 10,000 pages long across Working Groups! Fortunately, a synthesis report integrating the findings of all three working groups should be released in Autumn 2022. However, we, at the EGU Cryosphere Blog, thought it might be us ...[Read More]