CR
Cryospheric Sciences

Image of the Week

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]

Image Of The Week – Do My Ice Deceive Me?

April 1, 2016
Image Of The Week – Do My Ice Deceive Me?
F.I.B. in the ice, (credit: the person who took the shot would rather stay anonymous and not tell where the picture was taken sorry)

A few weeks ago, we focussed our image of the week on very particular parts of Antarctica, which display blue ice at the surface. Today we would like to put the spotlight on an even more extreme chromatic phenomenon : the Fyndið ísjaki Brandari (should be pronounced “/fɪːntɪð/ˈiːsjacɪ /ˈprantaːrɪ/“, even though a bit of phonetics never hurt anyone, for the sake of simplicity this phenomenon ...[Read More]

Image of The Week – When Glaciers Fertilize Oceans

March 25, 2016
Image of The Week – When Glaciers Fertilize Oceans
Figure 1: Sediment rich meltwaters from Leverett Glacier pour over a waterfall in south west Greenland (credit: Jon Hawkings)

Today’s Image of the Week shows meltwaters originating from Leverett Glacier pouring over a waterfall in southwest Greenland. We have previously reported on how meItwater is of interest to Glaciologist (e.g. here) but today we are going to delve into how and why Biologists also study these meltwaters and how the cryosphere interacts with biogeochemical cycles in our oceans. Where? Leverett G ...[Read More]

Image of the Week – Monitoring icy rivers from space!

March 18, 2016
Image of the Week – Monitoring icy rivers from space!
River-ice cover on the Vistula (Poland) classified from Satellite SAR data. (A – left) River ice cover on Vistula River on 28th January, 2015 (RADARSAT-2, RGB: HH HV VV). (B – right) Ice cover classification based on RADARSAT-2 data. 'Class 1' - smooth ice cover without ice dam underneath (black ice); 'Class 2' - ice cover with loosely agglomerated mobile ice; 'Class 3' - ice cover with consolidated mobile ice, see text for explanation [Credit: Helena Łoś]

Why? When a river freezes over, it changes the amount of water that flows through the river system. River ice affects many of the world’s largest rivers, and in the Northern Hemisphere, approximately 60% of rivers experience significant seasonal effects. The formation and evolution of river ice changes river discharge and is not only of interest to local ice skating enthusiasts. The variations in ...[Read More]

Image of The Week – That’s a Damn Fine Ice Dam!

March 11, 2016
Image of The Week – That’s a Damn Fine Ice Dam!
Figure 1: Perito Moreno Glacier terminus, Argentina. The glacier's continual advance disconnects the Brazo Rico (on the left) from the greater Lago Argentino (right), preventing drainage. Photo Credit: Evan Miles.

With today’s image of the week we want to transport you to Patagonia to look at a unique fresh-water calving glacier –  Perito Moreno in Argentina. This is a hot topic at the moment as the glacier did something rather unusual yesterday, read on to find out more….. This large glacier (Fig 2, highlighted red) flows down a valley, calving into the southwestern arm of Lago Argentino ...[Read More]

Image of the Week — Last Glacial Maximum in Europe

March 4, 2016
Image of the Week — Last Glacial Maximum in Europe
Last glaciation in Europe, ~70,000-20,000 year BP (credit: Wikimedia Commons user Ulamm)

During the last ice age*, ~70,000 to 20,000 years ago, the climate was much colder in Europe. As a result, the northern part of Europe was fully covered by the Fennoscandian (a.k.a the Scandinavian ) ice sheet, which extended up to the British Isles and some parts of Poland and Germany. In central Europe, the Alps were also almost fully glaciated. The storage of all this ice on the continent lower ...[Read More]

Image of the Week – Antarctic fieldwork 50 years ago!

February 26, 2016
Image of the Week – Antarctic fieldwork 50 years ago!
Rest break in the Sør Rondane Mountains, East Antarctica. Summer campaign 1964-1965 of the Belgian-Dutch Antarctic Expeditions (Credit: Jean-Jacques Derwael)

So far this blog has published many pictures of current polar field work campaigns. Today, we would like to take you back to Antarctic expeditions during the 1960s. The photos presented in this post date back from the Belgian-Dutch Antarctic field campaigns of 1964-1966. The first picture shows Ken Blaiklock (red overalls) with a Belgian surveyor. Ken was part of the 1955–58 Commonwealth Trans-Ant ...[Read More]

Image of the Week – Changes in the Greenland Ice Sheet Documented by Satellite

February 19, 2016
Image of the Week – Changes in the Greenland Ice Sheet Documented by Satellite
Changes in mass of the Greenland Ice Sheet over 10 years from GRACE satelite data (Luthcke et al., 2013).

Monitoring the changing ice mass of the Greenland Ice Sheet provides valuable information about how the ice sheet is responding to changing climate, but how do we make these measurements over such a large area of ice? Using NASA’s GRACE satellites (twin-satellites flying in formation) it is possible to make detailed measurements of the Earth’s gravitational field. As ice is gained/lost from ...[Read More]