Cryospheric Sciences

Did you know… the surface of melting glaciers is one of the most radioactive places on Earth?

Giovanni Baccolo May 29, 2020

Small cryoconite holes covered by thin ice lids. Photo credit : Giovanni Baccolo

Recent studies show that glaciers are significantly affected by pollution, and in general by human activities, but few people would imagine that their surface contains traces of nuclear contamination and radioactivity. It has been recently claimed that high amounts of radioactivity have accumulated on glaciers, only beaten by the radioactivity levels of sites where nuclear incidents and tests have ...[Read More]

Did you know… tropical cyclones cause large snowfall on Kilimanjaro’s glaciers?

Emily Collier May 22, 2020

Tropical cyclones are an important part of the weather in the southwest Indian Ocean each year, from November through April. These storms can cause massive destruction and loss of life when they make landfall, which happens most often on the islands of Mauritius and Madagascar and the coastal region of Mozambique. However, until recently, relatively little was known about their impacts on the high ...[Read More]

©LEt’sGO to Antarctica !

Brice Van Liefferinge and Marie Cavitte May 15, 2020

The camp site deployed to collect radar data with (a) the polar vehicle (in orange in the centre) or (b) snowmobiles (on the right). Other types of measurements are often carried out simultaneously: atmospheric gas composition, snow/ice core drilling, surface photogrammetry, etc. Can you spot them all ? Photo credit: Brice Van Liefferinge

With the current situation, polar fieldwork might be/have been cancelled and we have a suggestion to remedy your field-blues… Why not use ©LEGO to pretend you’re back in the field with the added bonus that you get to be in the warmth and comfort of your home! Here, we’ve re-enacted radar fieldwork that took place a year and a half ago in Antarctica… But first, let’s start with some backgroun ...[Read More]

What to expect from shareEGU20? Tips and tricks from the Cryosphere perspective

EGU Cryosphere Team and the Early career Glaciologist Group (EGG) April 30, 2020

Image credit: Daniela Rapavá (distributed via imaggeo).

Despite the current situation, the European Geosciences Union has decided not to give up on its most important event of the year: the EGU General Assembly. While they usually meet in Vienna every late April/early May, geoscientists will meet online this year! This event, called “shareEGU20” gives every interested geoscientist the opportunity to attend the EGU general assembly, free of charge and f ...[Read More]

Icequakes, the little brothers of earthquakes, what do they tell us about ice flow?

Sofia-Katerina Kufner April 24, 2020

Figure 1: Location of Rutford Ice Stream (inset, top), the 2019/2020 field team (inset, bottom) and our camp in the shade of Mount Vinson, Antarctica’s highest peak at 4892 metres. Figure courtesy of Mike Kendall and Sofia Kufner.

Each day, several tens of tiny earthquakes happen beneath Rutford Ice Stream in Antarctica. These events are so small that no human would be able to feel them – yet, scientists can use recordings of these so-called “icequakes” to obtain valuable information on the way ice flows in Antarctica. Read on to find out how… What are icequakes? So we’ve all heard of earthquakes, but what ...[Read More]

For dummies – About ice sheet models and their cold relationship to climate models

Konstanze Haubner April 17, 2020

Climate models help us understand processes occurring in and between atmosphere, oceans, land and ice-covered regions of our planet. One important process impacting all of us is sea level rise, and the ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland (currently losing more and more ice) play a crucial role in future sea level rise projections. Even though climate models can be very complex and include many ...[Read More]

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

Clara Burgard April 10, 2020

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]

Does debris cover offset glacier retreat in the Greater Caucasus?

Levan Tielidze April 3, 2020

Figure 1: Supra-glacial debris cover (SDC) change on the Elbrus Massif from 1986 to 2014. A SPOT-7 image is used as the background. Blue shows retreat of clean-ice parts. Clean ice in 1986 consists of the clean ice in 2014 (grey, transparent) plus clean-ice area that retreated between 1986 and 2014 (dark blue). Credit: Tielidze et al., 2020

In this week’s blog, Levan Tielidze tells us about supra-glacial debris cover change for the Greater Caucasus. His recent study indicates more than a doubling in the area of supra-glacial debris cover for the Elbrus Massif‘s glaciers from 1986 to 2014, the largest glacierized massif in the whole region. Glaciers on the western slope of the Elbrus Massif are affected by avalanches and thus ar ...[Read More]

Life of a scientist: When fieldwork doesn’t go to plan…

Isobel Rowell March 27, 2020

Climate research questions tend to focus on the future. What will global temperature be in 2100? Will extreme weather events become more frequent? When will sea level rise render coastal homes uninhabitable? But our understanding of climate processes first comes from observing the past: palaeoclimatology. To get these records, scientists often go on fieldwork to collect samples. But what happens w ...[Read More]

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

Keir Nichols March 20, 2020

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]