CR
Cryospheric Sciences

Cryospheric Sciences

An Antarctic Road Trip

June 8, 2016
An Antarctic Road Trip
Arriving at our first drill site with our sledge containing drill equipment, survival box and of course our lunch. Credit: N. B. Karlsson

Working in the Arctic and Antarctic presents its own challenges. It is perhaps easy to imagine how a station situated close to the coast is resupplied: during the summer, one or more ships will arrive bringing fuel, food and equipment, but what about stations inland? Flying in supplies by aircraft is expensive and, in the case of large quantities of fuel, unsustainable. Besides, many stations are ...[Read More]

Image of the Week – Mushrooms at zero degrees = hair ice?!

June 3, 2016
Image of the Week – Mushrooms at zero degrees = hair ice?!
Hair ice in a forest near Moosseedorf, Switzerland (Credit: Christian Mätzler)

  When you go down to the woods today you’re in for a big surprise….. hair ice!  Did you know that there is a type of ice called hair ice? It is shaped like fine, silky hairs and looks like white candy floss. It grows on the rotten branches of broad-leaf trees during humid winter nights when the air temperature drops slightly below 0°C. A 100-year-old theory states that hair ice a ...[Read More]

Image of the Week — Historical aerial imagery of Greenland

May 27, 2016
Image of the Week — Historical aerial imagery of Greenland
Aerial photo of the Zackenberg delta in North-East Greenland taken in 1932. (Credit: Danish Geodata Agency)

A few month ago, we were taking you on a trip back to Antarctic fieldwork 50 years ago, today we go back to Greenland during 1930s! When geopolitics serves cryospheric sciences The Permanent Court of International Justice in The Hague awarded Danish sovereignty over Greenland in 1933 and besides geopolitical interests, Denmark had a keen interest in searching for natural resources and new opportun ...[Read More]

European Space Agency Living Planet Symposium 2016

May 26, 2016
European Space Agency Living Planet Symposium 2016
Background: Prague Castle as viewed from the Charles Bridge (Credit: Stephen Chuter)

Living Planet Symposium Between the 9th and 13th May, Prague played host to the European Space Agency’s (ESA) fourth Living Planet Symposium. The event, the largest in its history with over 3300 attendees, brought together the earth observation community across multiple disciplines to discuss significant scientific results and the future developments of earth observation missions. Earth Observatio ...[Read More]

Image of The Week – Tumbling Rocks

May 20, 2016
Image of The Week – Tumbling Rocks
A 15,000 m³ rockfall during the 2015 summer heat wave at Tour de Ronde summit, Mont Blanc Massif. (Photo credit: Ludovic Ravanel.)

This photo captures a rockfall at the summit of Tour de Ronde, 3792 m above sea level in the Mont Blanc Massif. On 27 August 2015, around 15000 m3  of rock fell from the steep walls of the mountain. Why do mountains crumble ? Rockfalls such as the one on the photo have been linked to thawing permafrost. The exact mechanism that leads to these events is not fully understood, however, it is thought ...[Read More]

Image of the Week – See How Seasonal Sea Ice Decline Differs!

May 13, 2016
Image of the Week – See How Seasonal Sea Ice Decline Differs!
Figure 1: Arctic sea-ice area (75°N to 90°N) VS global annual mean surface air temperature for the complex model MPI-ESM-LR. Red dots represent a seasonal average over autumn (September/October/November) and blue dots over spring (March/April/May) of a particular year in the historical and future (RCP8.5) simulations. The dotted black lines result from a linear orthogonal regression in the ice area regime with the steepest change (Credit: subset of fig 2 from Bathiany et al, 2016 ).

Why do we care about sea ice in the first place? Sea ice is important for several components of the climate system. Due to its high albedo, sea ice reflects a high amount of the incoming solar radiation and is therefore relevant for the Earth’s energy budget. Sea ice inhibits the exchange of heat, moisture and momentum between ocean and atmosphere, which usually occur at the sea surface. Whe ...[Read More]

From Hot to Cold – Volcanology Meets the Cryosphere

May 10, 2016
From Hot to Cold – Volcanology Meets the Cryosphere

Hello again, I’m Kathi Unglert, and you’re about to read my third and final post as a student reporter at EGU 2016. Today I am writing about my experience in the cryosphere sessions from my volcanology perspective. In preparation for the conference I kept thinking about what sort of research I would see in the cryosphere sessions. I had never really attended any specific conferences or meetings on ...[Read More]

Image of the Week — Glowing Ice

May 6, 2016
Image of the Week — Glowing Ice
Glowing ice -- winning picture of the EGU photo contest 2016. The image shows a block of ice on the shores of Jökulsárlón, Iceland. [credit: Katharine Cashman (distributed via imaggeo.egu.eu)]

Two weeks ago, the EGU General Assembly was coming to an end in Vienna. With over 16,500 participants, this year’s edition was bigger and more varied than ever (e.g check out this good overview of the science-policy short course, published 2 days ago on geolog). The week was particularly fruitful for the cryospheric sciences and to mark this we have cherry-picked one of the winning picture o ...[Read More]

Careers at the European Space Agency – How and Why?

May 3, 2016
Careers at the European Space Agency – How and Why?
Flow speed of Jakobshavn Isbræ outlet glacier (South West Greenland) in winter 2014. Credit: ESA

As the pace of modern life speeds up and job competition becomes even more fierce, it is good to have a focused plan of where you would like to be in the future. The European Space Agency (ESA) offers traineeships and research positions to young scientists on a regular basis. They may be a springboard into your chosen career path, but how do you go about bagging one of these valuable opportunities ...[Read More]

Image of the Week – Storing water in Antarctica to delay sea-level rise

April 29, 2016
Image of the Week – Storing water in Antarctica to delay sea-level rise
Difference in ice thickness from the initial equilibrium state after 100 years of ice addition (upper panels) and 1000 years after the end of the forcing (lower panels). Two scenarios are shown, 200 km (left panels) and 800 km (right panels) from the coastline, both corresponding to a sea-level mitigation of 10 mm per year (credit: Frieler et al., 2016, fig 3) .

  Sea level rise Sea-level rise is one of the main impacts of the current global warming and its rate has dramatically increased in the last decades (the current rate is about 3 mm per year). Even if greenhouse gas emissions were stopped today, sea level would continue to rise due to the slow Earth climate system response (IPCC, 2013, chap. 13). It is therefore a considerable threat for popul ...[Read More]