CR
Cryospheric Sciences

Image of the Week

Image of the Week: Antarctic ice-shelf thickness

October 9, 2015
Image of the Week: Antarctic ice-shelf thickness
Thickness of the Antarctic ice shelves. Credit: M. Depoorter

Thickness of floating ice shelves in Antarctica. Ice thickness is greatest close to the grounding line where it can reach 1000 meters or more (red). Away from the grounding line, the ice rapidly thins to reach a few hundreds of meters at the calving front. Ice thickness varies greatly from one ice shelf to another. Within ice shelves, “streams of ice” can be spotted originating from in ...[Read More]

Image of the Week : SAFIRE team getting ready to drill in Greenland

October 2, 2015
Image of the Week : SAFIRE team getting ready to drill in Greenland
The SAFIRE team sets up the drilling device on the Store Glacier, Western Greenland. Credit : T.J. Young

How do you get a hot water drill onto an ice sheet? The Subglacial Access and Fast Ice Research Experiment (SAFIRE) uses a hot water drill to directly access and observe the physical and geothermal properties where the ice meets rock or sediment at the glacier-bed interface. Here, SAFIRE principal investigator Bryn Hubbard and post-doc Sam Doyle help fly in the drill spool at the start of the Summ ...[Read More]

Image of the week : formation of an ice rise

September 25, 2015
Image of the week : formation of an ice rise

Deglaciation and formation of an ice rise with the ice-sheet model BISICLES.  The simulation starts with an ice sheet in steady state that overrides a topographic high in the bed, close to the calving front. The sea level is then forced to rise steadily with 1 cm per year during 15 thousand years, and the simulation goes on until the ice sheet reaches steady state. The animation below shows that t ...[Read More]

Image of the Week: Hochjochferner

September 18, 2015
Image of the Week: Hochjochferner
The margin at Hochjochferner in the fog. Credit: N. B. Karlsson.

The margin of the glacier “Hochjochferner” on the border between Austria and Italy. This glacier has been monitored with an Automatic Weather Station for several years by the Institute for Marine and Atmospheric research in Utrecth, NL.It is also the destination of the field trip that takes place during the annual Karthaus summer school in ice and climate. Here, students are exploring ...[Read More]

Image of the Week: GISP II Borehole

September 11, 2015
Image of the Week: GISP II Borehole
The GISP II (Greenland Ice Sheet Project Two) borehole at Summit Station, Greenland. Credit: N. B. Karlsson

Climate records from ice cores have helped scientists understand the past changes in climate.The GISP II (Greenland Ice Sheet Project Two) ice core was more than 3km long and was drilled during a five year period in the 1990s. After the drilling ended the casing of the borehole was extended above the surface, so that the borehole can still be accessed for remeasurements of, for example, temperatur ...[Read More]

Image of the Week: Greenland Ice Streams

September 4, 2015
Image of the Week: Greenland Ice Streams
Credit: Copernicus data (2015)/ESA/Enveo

This image is from the west coast of Greenland and it shows several glaciers flowing towards the sea (upper part of the image), transporting ice into the ocean. The colours show the velocity of the ice. As the ice gets nearer to the coast it speeds up reaching speeds over 15m/day. The velocities were calculated using two Sentinel-1A radar scans from 3 and 15 January 2015. You can download a high r ...[Read More]