Cryospheric Sciences

Will the Arctic be ice free earlier than previously thought?

David Docquier September 17, 2021

Figure 1: Polar bear on sea ice in Chukchi Sea, Arctic Ocean. Figure credit: Alla Khan, NSIDC, CC BY 2.0.

There is no doubt that the Arctic is currently losing its sea ice as our climate is warming. And this process will carry on as temperatures continue climbing. But the rate at which sea ice will melt in the future and the exact date when the Arctic will be free of sea ice is not known due to several factors (which will be briefly discussed in this post). Torben Koenigk and I have selected climate m ...[Read More]

Mapping sea ice from space

Andrea Schneider, Thomas Kræmer, Alistair Everett, Johannes Lohse, Nick Hughes and Tom Rune Lauknes September 10, 2021

Figure 1. The thinning and retreating of sea ice have led to increased human activity in Arctic waters. Hence, marine traffic and activities such as fishing, shipping, oil and mineral exploitation are expected to increase in the future. To handle navigation in ice-covered waters, vessel crews need appropriate planning support. [Credit: Alex Perz/Unsplash]

Reduced and thinner sea ice makes Arctic waters increasingly appealing for shipping, fishing, tourism, and mineral exploration. However, with increased accessibility and more dynamic ice conditions comes a greater risk for ship crews to encounter sea ice and icebergs outside of their usual seasonal limits. To help them navigate, timely and reliable sea ice information is key. Have you wondered how ...[Read More]

Cryo-adventures – Undertaking Cryo-Fieldwork in a Global Pandemic!

Nathaniel Baurley September 3, 2021

Looking out over Fjallsjökull from the top of the nearby moraine ridge. Photo credit: Nathaniel Baurley

Have you ever wondered what undertaking cryo-fieldwork in a glacial environment typically involves? Well, what about undertaking cryo-fieldwork in a glacial environment during a global pandemic?! Read on to find out all about the challenges I faced on my recent trip to Iceland in July 2021… Fieldwork Preparation As this previous blog post highlights, undertaking cryo-fieldwork requires a significa ...[Read More]

Did you know about Artificial Glaciers?

Giovanni Baccolo August 27, 2021

Figure 1. The Presena glacier in the central Alps (Adamello-Presanella range) is one of the most famous “artificial” glaciers. Here we are in September 2020 and you see a snowcat in the process of removing the white tarps that cover the glacier in summer, visible in its upper part. Is this a glacier or a construction site? [Credits: Giovanni Baccolo]

There are several ways that we can classify glaciers. We can look at their shape, their size, their type of terminus, and many other features. A new characteristic has recently been gaining in popularity: artificiality. Yes, we now have a few artificial glaciers! Have you ever heard about them? They are glaciers whose behavior is directly influenced by human interventions in order to improve their ...[Read More]

Did you know about the weathering crust? Five things you never knew about glacier surfaces

Ian Stevens August 20, 2021

The weathered surface of the Greenland Ice Sheet. Photo credit: Ian Stevens

To the untrained eye, the melting surface of glaciers and ice sheets can look a little boring. It’s bright in some places, dark in others, and there are lots of things to fall over and (hopefully not) get your feet wet in. However, a huge range of processes are occurring both upon and just underneath the ice surface, in a 50-ish cm thick layer of ice called the weathering crust (or the “crust” for ...[Read More]

Re-discovering the British North Greenland Expedition 1952-54

Neil Ross August 13, 2021

Figure 1. Map of the major field localities (red dots), including the BNGE bases at Britannia Sø and North Ice, and the approximate traverse route (red lines) of the British North Greenland Expedition (adapted from Hamilton 1956). North East Greenland Ice Stream (NEGIS) is indicated. Base map is a multidirectional hillshade of the 100 m Arctic DEM (25x vertical exaggeration) overlain by the ITS LIVE 120 m ice velocity dataset. Both basemap datasets were accessed via https://qgreenland.org/ [credits: Neil Ross]

How did we (nearly) all forget about, or simply overlook, a large-scale two-year long mid-20th Century scientific expedition to the northern Greenland Ice Sheet? Particularly an expedition that kick-started some significant glaciological and geophysical careers, developed large-scale polar logistical capabilities, traversed the ice sheet, acquired some novel and critical data, and asked some big r ...[Read More]

Image of the week – The hidden ice of mountainous regions

Federica Minotti July 9, 2021

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]

Questions from space: what is snow and what is ice on the Greenland ice sheet?

Adrien Wehrlé July 2, 2021

Fig.1: Extremely dark bare ice at QAS_U automatic weather station on August 4, 2014. Credits: Jason E. Box

We usually think of a glacier as a white, clean surface. Well, this is only an idealized vision because in reality glaciers are far from immaculate, they can be colored! And this is extremely important since colored (dirty) ice absorbs more solar radiation than clean ice, accelerating melt. One of the places on Earth where it is fundamental to understand these processes is Greenland, where ice is ...[Read More]

The softness of ice, how we measure it, and why it matters for sea level rise

Emma Smith & TJ Young June 25, 2021

Figure: The Scott Polar Research Institute’s beautiful fabric maps show that Antarctica is composed of the combination of many different aspects, including snow, rocks, volcanoes, and biological life. Although the fabric of ice does not refer to material textiles, the analogy is similar in that ice fabric represents the physical composite of all its constituent ice crystals. [Image credit: Derek Langley / Naomi Chapman (SPRI University of Cambridge)]

One of the first things school children learn is that ice is a solid, and forms by freezing water. Most people think of ice as brittle–have you ever dropped a slippery ice cube on the kitchen floor, and watch it break and shatter into many pieces? It may be surprising, then, to find that ice can also stretch and squeeze, like a ball of pizza dough! Once deformed, ice is then softer in certai ...[Read More]

The Norwegian Polar Institute

Ashley Morris June 18, 2021

Spot the glaciologists! Norwegian Polar Institute researchers work on the highly crevassed surface of the fast-flowing glacier Kronebreen, near Ny-Ålesund, in northwestern Spitsbergen. Credit: Elvar Ørn Kjartansson, Norsk Polarinstitutt.

It is a pleasure for the EGU Cryoblog team to present a new post category: Cryo-institutes around the world! There are many institutes working on cryosphere-related research spread around the world. The aim of this new category is to highlight the cool research that is carried out at these institutes, showing off our multi-faceted cryo-related science. In this opening post, Ashley Morris will pres ...[Read More]