CR
Cryospheric Sciences

Cryospheric Sciences

Image of the Week – Drilling into a Himalayan glacier

Image of the Week – Drilling into a Himalayan glacier

How water travels through and beneath the interior of debris-covered glaciers is poorly understood, partly because it can be difficult to access these glaciers at all, never mind explore their interiors. In this Image of the Week, find out how these aspects can be investigated by drilling holes all the way through the ice… Hydrological features of debris-covered glaciers Debris-covered glaciers ca ...[Read More]

Image of the Week – Fifty shades of snow

Image of the Week – Fifty shades of snow

When I think of snow, I tend to either think about the bright white ski slopes in the mountains or the large white areas in the Arctic. However, natural phenomena can lead to colorful snow. Our Image of the Week shows snow can be green! Snow can also turn orange, pinkish, grey and even yellow… But where do these different shades of snow come from? White The most common color of snow is white (see ...[Read More]

Image of the Week – Summer is fieldwork season at EastGRIP!

Image of the Week – Summer is fieldwork season at EastGRIP!

As the days get very long, summer is a popular season for conducting fieldwork at high latitudes. At the North East Greenland Ice Stream (NEGIS), the East Greenland Ice-core Project (EastGRIP) is ongoing. Several scientists are busy drilling an ice core through the ice sheet to the very bottom, in continuation to previous years (see here and here). This year, amongst others, several members from t ...[Read More]

Image of the Week — High altitudes slow down Antarctica’s warming

When it comes to climate change, the Arctic and the Antarctic are poles apart. At the north of the planet, temperatures are increasing twice as fast as in the rest of the globe, while warming in Antarctica has been milder. A recent study published in Earth System Dynamics shows that the high elevation of Antarctica might help explain why the two poles are warming at different speeds. The Arctic vs ...[Read More]

Image of the Week – The birth of a sea-ice dragon!

Image of the Week – The birth of a sea-ice dragon!

Dragon-skin ice may sound like the name of an episode of the Game of Thrones fantasy franchise. However, this fantasy name hides a rare and bizarre type of ice formation that you can see in our Image of the Week. It has been recently observed by the “Polynyas, ice production and seasonal evolution in the Ross Sea” (PIPERS) research team in Antarctica. This bizarre phenomenon caused by ...[Read More]

Image of the Week – Heat waves during Polar Night!

  The winter 2016-2017 has been one of the hottest on record in the Arctic. In our Image of the Week, you can see that air temperatures were positive in the middle of the winter! Let’s talk about the reasons and implications of this warm Arctic winter. But first, let’s take a tour in Svalbard, the gateway to the Arctic… A breach in the one of the world’s largest seed vaults The Global S ...[Read More]

Image of the Week – When the dirty cryosphere destabilizes!

Image of the Week – When the dirty cryosphere destabilizes!

Ice is usually something you see covering large ocean areas, mountain tops and passes or as huge sheets in polar regions. This type of ice is clearly visible from space or with the naked eye. There is, however, a large volume of ice that is less visible. This ice is distributed over the polar and high alpine permafrost regions; and is the ice hidden below ground. It might be hidden, but that doesn ...[Read More]

Image of the Week – Far-reaching implications of Everest’s thinning glaciers

From 1984 to 2015, approximately 71,000 Olympic size swimming pools worth of water were released from the melting Khumbu Glacier in Nepal, which is home to Everest Basecamp. Find out how Himalayan glaciers are changing and the implications for downstream communities in this Image of the Week. Himalayan glaciers supply freshwater Himalayan glaciers supply meltwater for ~800 million people, includin ...[Read More]

Image of the Week – Ice lollies falling from the sky

You have more than probably eaten many lollipops as a kid (and you might still enjoy them). The good thing is that you do not necessarily need to go to the candy shop to get them but you can simply wait for them to fall from the sky and eat them for free. Disclaimer: this kind of lollies might be slightly different from what you expect… Are lollies really falling from the sky? Eight years ag ...[Read More]

Image of the Week – How geometry limits thinning in the interior of the Greenland Ice Sheet

Image of the Week –  How geometry limits thinning in the interior of the Greenland Ice Sheet

The Greenland ice sheet flows from the interior out to the margins, forming fast flowing, channelized rivers of ice that end in fjords along the coast. Glaciologists call these “outlet glaciers” and a large portion of the mass loss from the Greenland ice sheet is occurring because of changes to these glaciers. The end of the glacier that sits in the fjord is exposed to warm ocean water that can me ...[Read More]