CR
Cryospheric Sciences

Image of the Week

Crater Glacier: A story of renewal in the aftermath of destruction

March 11, 2022
Crater Glacier: A story of renewal in the aftermath of destruction
Crater Glacier, as photographed in 2007. [Credit: Jon Major, U.S. Geological Survey]

Crater Glacier, located on Mount St. Helens, Washington State, U.S., tells a tale of renewal. The catastrophic and deadly May 18th, 1980 eruption of the volcano created, among other things, a deep horseshoe-shaped, north-facing crater and obliterated most of the glaciers that resided on the volcano’s slopes. By a decade and a half later, it was clear that a glacier had formed in this unlikely loca ...[Read More]

Let’s go to School of Sustainability!

September 24, 2021
Let’s go to School of Sustainability!
Logo of School of Sustainability, showing on the background our evident love for the Cryosphere [Credit: FAWLTS]

Next generations will not only see impacts of climate change first-hand, but they will also deal with the associated societal implications. Implementing climate solutions and orienting themselves in a growing, green job market need cutting-edge knowledge, which is often hard to get through the ordinary, high-school syllabus. As early-career cryo-scientists (Federica is a PhD student in glacial geo ...[Read More]

Image of the week – The hidden ice of mountainous regions

July 9, 2021
Image of the week – The hidden ice of mountainous regions
Fig. 1. Rock glacier in Switzerland [photo credit: B. Edmaier for IPA]

When speaking about glaciers and the ice they contain, we generally picture large, clean, and therefore relatively white mountain glaciers… But did you know about rock glaciers? From our Image of the Week, you might notice that they do not quite look like the classic ice glacier you might have had in mind. Indeed, they actually indicate the presence of mountain permafrost, an often poorly understo ...[Read More]

Image of the Week – Did you know that Arctic sea ice is melting from the bottom?

May 28, 2021

The current retreat of Arctic sea ice is a major sign of ongoing climate changes. And it could almost disappear during summer in a few decades from now, depending on the amount of greenhouse gases we will emit into the atmosphere. In this context, understanding what are the exact causes of this sea-ice loss is important. One of these causes is the amount of heat transported by the ocean (which dep ...[Read More]

Image of the Week – The mystery of the ice mushrooms

and February 26, 2021

Last week, the EGU Cryosphere Blog (“Cryoblog” for the regulars) team was contacted by a reader who stumbled upon very curious ice formations while taking a morning walk in rural Berkshire, England. This was right after a few nights with below-freezing temperatures and snowfall. He asked us whether we could explain to him what these ice mushrooms were and how they formed. Very curious and always k ...[Read More]

Image of the Week – Icebergs increase heat flux to glacier

January 15, 2021
Image of the Week – Icebergs increase heat flux to glacier
Iceberg in Sermilik Fjord. Figure credit: Donald Slater.

Icebergs are ubiquitous in Greenland’s fjords, melting and releasing freshwater as they float towards the open ocean. The amount of freshwater released from these icebergs can be vast – the equivalent of around 50,000 Olympic swimming pools per day in some fjords. New research reveals that this freshwater causes fjord currents to speed-up, which can actually increase the amount of heat delivered t ...[Read More]

Image of the Week – What darkens snow and ice?

September 18, 2020

“Be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow”. Hamlet, Act 3 Scene 1 (W. Shakespeare) Snow and ice are not always as pristine as one may think. If you have ever walked on a glacier or on a snowfield during summer, you might have already noticed that. In fact, both snow and ice are often darkened by impurities. In this blog post, you will learn about the main processes leading to ice and snow darkeni ...[Read More]

Image of the week – The curious case of “glacier mice”

July 3, 2020

  Did you know that glacier mice can be found at the surface of some glaciers? They’re not the tiny rodent you might be imagining, but actually little balls of moss, which appear to be full of mysteries still to be uncovered… What is a “glacier mouse”? On glaciers around the world, mostly at high-latitudes in the northern hemisphere, little balls of moss develop and move around the ice. Origi ...[Read More]

Did you know… the difference between sea-ice area and sea-ice extent?

April 10, 2020
Did you know… the difference between sea-ice area and sea-ice extent?
Fig. 1: Sea-ice landscape [Credit: Tapio Haaja on Unsplash]

At the beginning of March, just over a month ago, sea ice in the Arctic reached its annual maximum extent. As currently all media attention is focused on other news, you might have missed that, once again, this maximum fell below the 1981 to 2010 average maximum extent. When reading headlines about such sea-ice facts, you may have been confused by the seemingly interchangeable use of “sea-ice exte ...[Read More]

Radiocarbon rocks! – How rocks can tell us about the history of an ice sheet…

March 20, 2020
Radiocarbon rocks! – How rocks can tell us about the history of an ice sheet…
Figure 1: Collecting a bedrock sample from the Lassiter Coast, Antarctica [Credit: Joanne Johnson, British Antarctic Survey].

When most people hear the phrase “radiocarbon dating”, they think of measuring carbon to date organic material. But did you know that carbon is also produced within rocks, and that we can use it to learn about the past behaviour of a glacier? About 20,000 years ago it was colder and large parts of the continents were covered by ice. But what did Antarctica – the largest ice mass ...[Read More]