CR
Cryospheric Sciences

Image of the Week

Image of the Week – What’s Hot in the Cryosphere? A 2018 review

January 18, 2019
Image of the Week – What’s Hot in the Cryosphere? A 2018 review
In 2018, NASA’s Operation IceBridge captured this image of a tabular iceberg off the coast of the Antarctic Peninsula, leading to a flurry of media excitement. In this blog post, we’ll look at some of the other big scientific discoveries of 2018 in the field of cryospheric sciences [Credit: NASA / Jeremy Harbeck, CC-BY 2.0].

Every year, humanity understands more and more about a remote and unforgiving component of the Earth system – the cryosphere. 2018 has been no exception, and in this blog post we’ll take a look at some of the biggest scientific findings of cryospheric science in 2018. We will then look forward to 2019 and beyond, to see what the future holds for these rapidly changing climate component ...[Read More]

Image of the Week – Will Santa have to move because of Climate Change?

December 21, 2018

Because of global warming and polar amplification, temperature rises twice as fast at the North Pole than anywhere else on the planet. Could that be a problem for our beloved Santa Claus, who, according to the legend, lives there? It appears that Santa could very well have to move to one of its second residences before the end of this century. But even if he moves to another place, the smooth runn ...[Read More]

Image of the Week – Permafrost features disappearing from subarctic peatlands

December 14, 2018
Image of the Week – Permafrost features disappearing from subarctic peatlands
Remnants of palsa, most of which has already collapsed into surrounding pond [Credit: Mariana Verdonen].

Some of the most remarkable, marginal features of permafrost – palsas – are degrading and disappearing metre by metre from North European peatlands, and are driven close to extinction by the climate change. What are these permafrost features? A palsa is a peat mound with an icy core, which stays frozen throughout summer due to the insulating property of dry peat. These mounds can rise up to 10 met ...[Read More]

Image of the Week – Ice-Spy: the launch of ICESat-2

December 7, 2018

On September 15th, 2018, at 18:02 local time, NASA launched its newest satellite – the second generation Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat-2). ICESat-2 only contains one instrument – a space laser that fires 10,000 pulses per second to Earth to measure elevation. Its primary purpose is for monitoring the ever changing cryosphere, so naturally there are plenty of ice enthusiasts ...[Read More]

Image of the Week – (Un)boxing the melting under the ice shelves

November 30, 2018
Image of the Week – (Un)boxing the melting under the ice shelves
Figure 1: Melting underneath Antarctic ice shelves as modelled with the Potsdam Ice-shelf Cavity mOdel (PICO) for present-day ice geometries and ocean conditions. Extending a simple ocean box model approach (Olbers and Hellmer, 2010), it efficiently calculates the wide range of melting in Antarctica [Credit: adapted from Fig. 5 of Reese et al. (2018)]

The Antarctic ice sheet stores a large amount of water that could potentially add to sea level rise in a warming world (see this post and this post). It is currently losing ice, and the ice loss has been accelerating in the past decades. All this is linked to the melting of ice – not at the surface but at the base, underneath the so-called ice shelves which form the continuation of the Antarctic i ...[Read More]

Image of the Week – Breaking the ice: river ice as a marker of climate change

November 23, 2018

Common images associated with climate change include sad baby polar bears, a small Arctic sea ice extent, retreating glaciers, and increasing severe weather. Though slightly less well-known, river ice is a hydrological system which is directly influenced by air temperature and the amount and type of precipitation, both of which are changing under a warming climate. Ice impacts approximately 60 % o ...[Read More]

Image of the Week – Karthaus Summer School 2018

November 16, 2018

Nearly every year since the late 90s, during the summer, the picturesque Karthaus has hosted 10-day glaciology course. This school is a platform for glaciologists to explore, learn and expand their knowledge base. This helps researchers become multi-faceted: to view glaciology from the perspective of those specializing in other backgrounds such as hydrology, geomorphology, oceanography, etc. which ...[Read More]

Image of the Week – Promoting interdisciplinary science in the Arctic: what is IASC?

November 9, 2018
Image of the Week – Promoting interdisciplinary science in the Arctic: what is IASC?
IASC, the International Arctic Science Committee, is more than your regular committee. IASC connects Arctic scientists from 23 member countries and countless disciplines in order to promote and support impactful multi- and interdisciplinary Arctic research. IASC aims to foster a greater scientific understanding of the Arctic region and its role in the Earth system [Credit: IASC].

The Arctic is one of the fastest changing regions on the Earth, where climate change impacts are felt both earlier and more strongly than elsewhere in the world. As an integral part of the Earth system, the Arctic is shaped by global processes, and in turn, Arctic processes influence the living conditions of hundreds of millions of people at lower latitudes. No one country or community can underst ...[Read More]

Image of the Week – Alien-iced

November 2, 2018
Image of the Week – Alien-iced
Penitentes in the Bolivian Andes at an altitude of around 4400 m [Credit: Christoph Schmidt (distributed via imaggeo.egu.eu)]

What do Chile and Jupiter’s moon Europa have in common? If you like astronomy, you may reply “space missions!” – Chile’s dry air and clear skies make it an ideal location for telescopes like the VLT or ALMA, while Europa’s inferred subsurface ocean will be studied by the upcoming mission to Jupiter JUICE, due to launch in 2022. But Chile’s high altitude Atacama desert and Europa’s frozen surface a ...[Read More]

Do clouds affect melting over Antarctic ice shelves?

October 26, 2018

The Antarctic Peninsula is the ‘canary in the coalmine’ of Antarctic climate change. In the last half-century it has warmed faster than most other places on Earth, and considerable change has consequently been observed in the cryosphere, with several ice shelves collapsing in part or in full. Representing this change in models is difficult because we understand comparatively little abo ...[Read More]