CR
Cryospheric Sciences

Image of the Week

Image of the Week – The birth of a sea-ice dragon!

June 30, 2017
Image of the Week – The birth of a sea-ice dragon!
Fig. 1: Dragon-skin ice observation in Terra Nova Bay by the Nathan B Palmer research team in April 2017. [Credit: IMAS ].

Dragon-skin ice may sound like the name of an episode of the Game of Thrones fantasy franchise. However, this fantasy name hides a rare and bizarre type of ice formation that you can see in our Image of the Week. It has been recently observed by the “Polynyas, ice production and seasonal evolution in the Ross Sea” (PIPERS) research team in Antarctica. This bizarre phenomenon caused by ...[Read More]

Image of the Week – Heat waves during Polar Night!

June 23, 2017

  The winter 2016-2017 has been one of the hottest on record in the Arctic. In our Image of the Week, you can see that air temperatures were positive in the middle of the winter! Let’s talk about the reasons and implications of this warm Arctic winter. But first, let’s take a tour in Svalbard, the gateway to the Arctic… A breach in the one of the world’s largest seed vaults The Global S ...[Read More]

Image of the Week – When the dirty cryosphere destabilizes!

June 16, 2017
Image of the Week – When the dirty cryosphere destabilizes!
Figure 1: Thermokarst development due to melt and drainage of below-ground massive ice, NE Greenland [Credit: Laura Helene Rasmussen]

Ice is usually something you see covering large ocean areas, mountain tops and passes or as huge sheets in polar regions. This type of ice is clearly visible from space or with the naked eye. There is, however, a large volume of ice that is less visible. This ice is distributed over the polar and high alpine permafrost regions; and is the ice hidden below ground. It might be hidden, but that doesn ...[Read More]

Image of the Week – Far-reaching implications of Everest’s thinning glaciers

June 9, 2017

From 1984 to 2015, approximately 71,000 Olympic size swimming pools worth of water were released from the melting Khumbu Glacier in Nepal, which is home to Everest Basecamp. Find out how Himalayan glaciers are changing and the implications for downstream communities in this Image of the Week. Himalayan glaciers supply freshwater Himalayan glaciers supply meltwater for ~800 million people, includin ...[Read More]

Image of the Week – Ice lollies falling from the sky

June 2, 2017

You have more than probably eaten many lollipops as a kid (and you might still enjoy them). The good thing is that you do not necessarily need to go to the candy shop to get them but you can simply wait for them to fall from the sky and eat them for free. Disclaimer: this kind of lollies might be slightly different from what you expect… Are lollies really falling from the sky? Eight years ag ...[Read More]

Image of the Week – How geometry limits thinning in the interior of the Greenland Ice Sheet

May 26, 2017
Image of the Week – How geometry limits thinning in the interior of the Greenland Ice Sheet
Figure 1: (a) Mass change of the Greenland ice sheet measured by NASA’s GRACE mission in cm/yr water equivalent from January 2003 to December 2013 [Credit: modified from Velicogna et al., 2014]. (b) Dynamic surface elevation change and mass loss along the margin of West Greenland as measured by DEM differencing. The map shows surface elevation change from 1985 to present for 16 outlet glaciers. Circles represent mass change (estimated using 917 kg m-3 as ice density) with circle areas proportional to magnitude of mass change. [Credit: Denis Felikson]

The Greenland ice sheet flows from the interior out to the margins, forming fast flowing, channelized rivers of ice that end in fjords along the coast. Glaciologists call these “outlet glaciers” and a large portion of the mass loss from the Greenland ice sheet is occurring because of changes to these glaciers. The end of the glacier that sits in the fjord is exposed to warm ocean water that can me ...[Read More]

Image of the Week – Ice Ice Bergy

May 19, 2017
Image of the Week – Ice Ice Bergy
An iceberg travelling by Greenland. [Credit: Credit: Romain Schläppy, distributed via imaggeo.egu.eu]

They come in all shapes, sizes and textures. They can be white, deep blue or brownish. Sometimes they even have penguins on them. It is time to (briefly) introduce this element of the cryosphere that has not been given much attention in this blog yet: icebergs! What is an iceberg? Let’s start with the basics. An iceberg, which literally translates as “ice mountain”, is a bit of fresh ice that brok ...[Read More]

Image of the Week – Antarctica’s Flowing Ice, Year by Year

May 12, 2017

Today’s Image of the Week shows annual ice flow velocity mosaics at 1km resolution from 2005 to 2016 for the Antarctic ice sheet. These mosaics, along with similar data for Greenland (see Fig.2), were published by Mouginot et al, (2017) last month as part of NASA’s MEaSUREs (Making Earth System Data Records for Use in Research Environments) program. How were these images constructed? The mosaics s ...[Read More]

Image of the Week – A rather splendid round-up of CryoEGU!

May 5, 2017
Image of the Week – A rather splendid round-up of CryoEGU!
Symbiosis of fire, ice and water by Michael Grund. The picture was taken at Storforsen, an impressive rapid in the Pite River in northern Sweden [Credit: Michael Grund Imaggeo.egu.eu]

The 2017 edition of the EGU general assembly was a great success overall and for the cryospheric division in particular. We were for instance thrilled to see that two of the three winning photos of the EGU Photo contest featured ice! To mark the occasion we are delighted to use as our image of this week,  one of these pictures, which  shows an impressive rapid in the Pite River in northern Sweden. ...[Read More]

Image of the Week — We’re heading for Vienna

April 21, 2017
Image of the Week — We’re heading for Vienna
A Viennese tram during EGU 2016. Do you recognise the flag on the left? [Credit: F. Lepoudre]

♫ Tatata taaa tatatatata Tatata taaa tatatatatatatata We’re heading for Vienna (Vienna) And still we stand tall ‘Cause maybe they’ve seen us (seen us) And welcome us all, yeah With so many miles left to go And things to be found (to be found) I’m sure that we’ll all miss that so it’s the …  ♫ …congratulations, you’ve recognise the song….. ...[Read More]