New year, new team! We have some changes in our editorial team and would like to introduce our new chief editors to you today – please say hi to Mack and Leah! Mack and Leah will be taking over the role as chief editors from Maria Scheel, Lina Madaj, Emma Pearce and Loeka Jongejans. You …[Read More]
Cryospheric Sciences
Speaking Up for the Cryosphere at COP30
During the climate negotiations at COP30, the global importance of a warming cryosphere was stressed in various formats. The UNFCCC Conference of Parties (this year’s COP30) marks the yearly global climate negotiations which formed the aim to limit global warming to well below 2 °C (the 1.5 °C target) with the Paris Agreement at COP21 …[Read More]
When August Brought Snow: Unseasonal Snowfall Disrupts Life in Ladakh’s High Valley Village
August in Ladakh is a time of golden fields and harvest songs, not snowstorms. Yet in 2025, this rhythm broke. Panikhar village in Ladakh woke beneath fifteen centimetres of snow, an unseasonal blanket that changed the functioning of the valley and stunned its people. What began as a glaciological field trip turned into a firsthand …[Read More]
Geysers, Geese, and Graph Neural Networks: Impressions from the Glaciology in Machine Learning Summer School (GlaMacLeS)
An isolated, idyllic, and inspiring setting in the gorgeous Centennial Valley of Montana, where nothing pulls your attention from the task ahead, a motivated group of PhD students and postdocs in glaciology, and five energetic lecturers: the perfect combination for tackling the ambitious challenge of exploring the interface between glaciology and machine learning. Who wouldn’t …[Read More]
Heard Island Glaciers Are Shrinking Faster Than Ever! Here’s what you need to know.
In this blog post Dr Levan Tielidze from Monash University and Securing Antarctica’s Environmental Future shares insights from a new glacier assessment of Heard Island. Although rarely visited and largely unknown, Heard Island plays an outsized role in understanding how the Southern Ocean cryosphere is responding to global warming. The island is one of the …[Read More]
Cryosphere Caps: PhD hats and the researchers that wear them – Episode 5
This miniseries features the tradition of ‘PhD hat’ making in German research institutes and universities. For those of you unfamiliar with this idea (as I once was), this is one of the final milestones a graduate student has before they are officially a “Dr.”. Upon the successful defense of a thesis, the labmates of the …[Read More]
Cryo Adventures – Discovering the beauty of polar winter
Only one month after starting my PhD, I found myself in a tiny plane flying over one of the most beautiful and breathtaking landscapes I’ve ever seen. I was on the way to the northernmost settlement in the world – the research village Ny-Ålesund. What I expected from the trip: cold temperatures, darkness, and lots …[Read More]
Did you know: Soot is a melting agent for glaciers in Peru and China
Mountain glaciers are melting rapidly due to global warming. This process is being intensified by increasingly extreme natural events, such as forest fires and air pollution from human activities. One of the main culprits is a tiny but powerful pollutant called black carbon (commonly known as soot) which darkens the surface of the snow and …[Read More]
The Proglacial Puzzle: Sampling of Glacier-fed Lakes in Greenland
Would you like to follow the endeavours of a small team working in the ice-marginal terrain in South-West Greenland? They set out to investigate proglacial lakes using sediment coring, water sampling and gas collections (figure 1), aiming to better understand methane dynamics, proglacial terrain development and the environmental drivers behind methane production in glacially influenced lake …[Read More]
Cryosphere Caps: PhD hats and the researchers that wear them – Episode 4
This miniseries features the tradition of ‘PhD hat’ making in German research institutes and universities. For those of you unfamiliar with this idea (as I once was), this is one of the final milestones a graduate student has before they are officially a “Dr.”. Upon the successful defense of a thesis, the labmates of the …[Read More]