Cryospheric Sciences

SciComm notes: can Granny understand your science?

Maria Scheel March 11, 2024

A conversation between a person and a smiling elder lady.

Did you ever experience frustration when trying to explain your science to friends or family? But why does it matter if your grandma could understand your work? (Photo credit: Brett Sayles from pexels)

As an EGU division blog, we facilitate that the most recent cryoscientific insights reach a wider audience. To do this, we have a team of experienced editors (and former authors), but we also love helping first time authors getting experience with outreach. But if you have ever written an outreach piece, you might know that it can be more difficult than expected to write down your research in simp ...[Read More]

Did you know that a lack of Arctic shipping regulation has detrimental environmental effects?

A. Stella Ebbersmeyer February 20, 2024

Figure 1: Ship in polar waters. [Credit: 12019 from Pixabay]

Increased maritime transport in the Arctic, facilitated by the reduction in sea ice cover, is causing tremendous harm to an already vulnerable part of the world. Insufficient regulation of Arctic shipping has detrimental environmental effects on a global scale. These effects include, e.g. underwater noise pollution, oil spill risk and threats to the global climate. But did you know what role regul ...[Read More]

Ice-Hot News – You have a “cool” new Policy Point of Contact in the Cryosphere Division!

Marie Cavitte February 2, 2024

At the 2023 EGU General Assembly, our cryosphere division members all voted “YES!” to have a division policy point of contact! If you’re wondering how to engage in science policy at our division level, what a division policy officer does, who was named and what happened next… This blog post should answer a lot of these questions (or I hope)! First off, a little history about how policy officers ca ...[Read More]

You can’t unsee it – the impact of a good visual for scientific data

Maria Scheel January 22, 2024

From iconic album cover of Joy Division to depicting relevant updates on annual temperature anomalies. The way we depict our data, impacts how far it will be seen. [Credit: image left from Joy Division album ‘Unknown Pleasures’ from 1979 & right ERA4, C3S/ECMWF; edited by Maria Scheel].

We are visual learners after all and for many of us, creating visual content is far more out of our comfort zone than the already hard earned skills of writing itself. Still, creating an accessible image can be pivotal to not only the success of your paper, but also the reach of your science in general. Today’s post started with a climate figure that went viral because of its similarity to the ico ...[Read More]

Give your ears a holiday treat: our favourite polar podcasts

The Chief Editors December 18, 2023

Enjoy the holiday season with some really cool polar podcasts [Image credit: David Satterlee from Pixabay].

December is a busy month, and while we are busy preparing gifts and a mindful attitude for the festive season, finishing up projects for the year, at some point, we close the laptop and take our ride of choice home. So as a little treat for your ears, we found some 8 (+1) polar podcasts for those in need of a little inspiration. The podcasts are tackled from points of natural science, policy, hist ...[Read More]

A journey to the Edge of the Ice: Discovering How the Ocean Meets the Polar Sea Ice

Weixin Zhu and Lu Zhou December 12, 2023

Figure 1: Sentinel-1 image (EW swath mode) of the Marginal Ice Zone case in the Barents Sea on 2015-Feb-17. The CryoSat-2(CS2) track (black) and the retrieved alongtrack Marginal Ice Zone are shown (red). Wave-like structure is observed by Sentinel-1 (3-hr later than CS2). [Adapted from Zhu et al., 2023].

Let’s continue the journey of discovering cool facts about sea ice which started with breaking the ice. This time, we’re diving into a fascinating part of the Arctic and Antarctic: the Marginal Ice Zone (MIZ). Imagine a place where the vast, frozen world of sea ice meets the moving waters of the ocean underneath. This is the MIZ, a unique area where air, water, and ice mix and mingle. ItR ...[Read More]

Antarctica Uncovered: Exploring the Exposed Surfaces Around the Melting Continent

Evan Quinter December 4, 2023

A photo pf a rocky land with an ice mass in the background. The land has brownish plants.

Figure 1. A depicts the Hurd Glacier forefield over Sally Rocks, covered in various terrestrial organisms like lichen and mosses. B shows Livingston Island in relation to the Antarctic continent. Modified from Garrido-Benavent et al., 2020

In 2020, ocean scientists discovered a new island off the Pine Island Glacier ice shelf, naming it after the Norse goddess, Sif. The island is one of many new regions being exposed in the wake of increased ice shelf melting and glacial retreat. While these newly-revealed lands have been discussed in the Arctic and alpine ecosystems, the uncovered island and coastlines of Antarctica have been less ...[Read More]

UndercoverEisAgenten – Permafrost, drones and young explorers investigating Arctic change

Marlin M. Mueller and Josefine Lenz November 24, 2023

Figure 1: Aerial view of Aklavik Northwest Territories Canada: A serene grid-patterned settlement nestled by the Peel channel of the Mackenzie River, surrounded by autumnal wilderness. [Credit: Christian Thiel]

The “UndercoverEisAgenten” project takes us on a drone journey over the ever-changing permafrost landscapes. Initiated by the Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI) for Polar and Marine Research, the German Aerospace Center’s (DLR) Institute of Data Science, and the Heidelberg Institute for Geoinformation Technology (HeiGIT), this venture is about more than just capturing images. It̵ ...[Read More]

An exceptional year: What’s up with Antarctic sea ice?

David Docquier November 17, 2023

Figure 1: Daily cycle of the Antarctic sea-ice extent (in million km²) for each 10-year period between 1979 and 2018 (10-year averages) and for 3 separate years, including 2023 (red curve). Snapshot of 12 November 2023 [Credit: NASA., Comiso et al., “Current State of Sea Ice Cover”, see: https://earth.gsfc.nasa.gov/cryo/data/current-state-sea-ice-cover].

In our blog, we have written a lot about Arctic sea ice (see this post, this post and this post for recent examples). Much less has been written about Antarctic sea ice, i.e. its southern counterpart. That is not surprising as Arctic sea ice has experienced major losses since the late 1970s (beginning of satellite observations), while not much had happened to Antarctic sea ice (despite a small exp ...[Read More]

A ‘Ticking Bomb’: Understanding the 2023 Glacial Lake Outburst Flood (GLOF) in Sikkim Himalaya

Remya S N & Vishnu Nandan November 2, 2023

Two photos of a glacial lake, on the left in 2022 and on the right in 2013, visually smaller.

Figure 1. (a) South Lhonak lake (Cho) and associated landforms from December 2022. [Image Credit: Google Earth, and (b) A rare field photograph of the glacial lake documented in Raj et al. (2013), used with permission.

In this week’s blog post, Dr. Remya S N and Dr. Vishnu Nandan talk about how optical and radar satellite images were used to characterize the very recent catastrophic Glacial Lake Outburst Flood (GLOF) from the South Lhonak Lake in the Indian Himalaya before and after the flooding and highlight the importance of timely observations and monitoring for people’s livelihoods. The South Lhonak L ...[Read More]