The GROCE project, funded by the German Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF), takes an Earth-System approach to understand what processes are at play for the 79°N glacier (also known as Nioghalvfjerdsfjorden), in northeast Greenland. 79°N is a marine-terminating glacier, meaning it has a floating ice tongue (like an ice shelf) and feeds into the ocean. Approximately 8% of all the ice contain ...[Read More]
Image of the Week – The Lost Meteorites of Antarctica…
Fig. 1: Searching for meteorites in the Recovery Glacier region of Antarctica [Credit: Katherine Joy/Lost Meteorites of Antarctica].
When most people think of Antarctica, meteorites aren’t the first things that come to mind. Perhaps they imagine the huge ice shelves, the desolate interior, or perhaps penguin colonies near one of the scientific bases — but usually not meteorites. So why is our project looking for meteorites in Antarctica, and besides, aren’t they all lost until they are found? Let’s start with the A ...[Read More]
Image of the Week – Who let the (sun)dogs out?
How peaceful it is to contemplate the sky … This is especially true of polar northern or southern skies where the low temperatures can engender unique light phenomena. We often tend call them all, wrongly, sundogs, but in fact, many more phenomena exist. To list a few, you can observe a parhelic circle, a 22° halo, a pair of sun dogs, a lower tangent arc, a 46° halo, a circumzenithal arc, a parry ...[Read More]
Image of the Week – Kicking the ice’s butt(ressing)
Changes in the ice shelves surrounding the Antarctic continent are responsible for most of its current contribution to sea-level rise. Although they are already afloat and do not contribute to sea level directly, ice shelves play a key role through the buttressing effect. But which ice shelf regions are most important for this? The role of ice-shelf buttressing In architecture, the term “buttress” ...[Read More]
Image of the Week – Fifty shades of May (Glacier)
Three satellite images of May Glacier: optical, infrared, and SAR (see text)
With over 198 000 glaciers in the world, you can always find a glacier that fits your mood or a given occasion. So why not for example celebrate the first Image of the Week of May with a picture of the aptly named May Glacier? May Glacier is in fact not named after the month, but after Mr May, an officer onboard the Flying Fish during her expedition to the East Antarctic coast in the 1840s. Apart ...[Read More]
Image of the Week – Life in blooming melting snow
The new snow melting season has just started in the mountains of Europe and will last, in many alpine places, until the end of June. Weather in the middle of April is changeable. In the last few days sub-zero air temperatures have prevailed in the mountains during the day. In a frame of an international research project, me (Charles University) and Daniel Remias (Applied University Upper Austria), ...[Read More]
Image of the Week — Cavity leads to complexity
A 10km-long, 4-km-wide and 350m-high cavity has recently been discovered under one of the fastest-flowing glaciers in Antarctica using different airborne and satellite techniques (see this press release and this study). This enormous cavity previously contained 14 billion tons of ice and formed between 2011 and 2016. This indicates that the bottom of the big glaciers on Earth can melt faster tha ...[Read More]
Image of the Week – Cryo Connect presents: The top 50 media-covered cryosphere papers of 2018
Discover which cryospheric research articles were most successful in attracting media attention in 2018 according to the Altmetric score. Cryo Connect and Altmetric Scientists are generally aware of each others’ studies. But when a scientific study generates media interest, its impact can be boosted beyond the scientific community. The media can push the essence of scientific study to the broader ...[Read More]
A brief guide to Navigating EGU 2019!
Are you going to the EGU General Assembly in Vienna next week? If so, read on for a quick guide to navigating the week: Where to start, what to see and how to meet people and enjoy yourself! After all, the meeting is as much about the opportunities to meet scientists from all over the world as it is about the science itself. How on Earth do I know what is going on?! The EGU General Assembly (GA) i ...[Read More]
Image of the Week – 5th Snow Science Winter School
From February 17th to 23rd, 21 graduate students and postdoctorate researchers from around the world made their way to Hailuoto, a small island on the coast of Finland, to spend a week learning about snow on sea-ice for the 5th Snow Science Winter School. The course, jointly organized by the Finnish Meteorological Institute and the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landsca ...[Read More]