Cryospheric Sciences

Image of the Week — Glowing Ice

Sophie Berger May 6, 2016

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?

Anna Maria Trofaier & Anna Hogg May 3, 2016

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

David Docquier April 29, 2016

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]

When Cryospheric Research Transforms Lives

Kathi Unglert April 22, 2016

My name is Kathi Unglert, and I’m reporting from the EGU 2016 General Assembly as part of the EGU student reporter programme. Below is my second contribution to the Cryosphere Blog – this time about how cryosphere research can have a real impact on people’s lives. Antoni Lewkowicz – he’s famous, according to a comment I overheard in Tuesday’s PICO session on applied geophysics in cryosphere ...[Read More]

Image of The Week – EGU General Assembly 2016

Emma C. Smith April 22, 2016

The sun sets over the Austria Center Vienna (ACV), where the 2016 EGU General Assembly is being held this week. Photo Credit: Nanna B. Karlsson.

The EGU General Assembly, which takes place each year in Vienna, Austria, draws to a close today. Attended by nearly 13,650 participants from 111 countries, with around a third of those being students – a great turn-out for this vital part of the early career scientists (ECS) community! It has been a very productive meeting for the cryosphere division with a huge number and variety of oral ...[Read More]

Image of The Week – The Ice Your Eyes Can’t See!

Emma C. Smith April 15, 2016

Figure 1: Soil carbon map of the Northern Hemisphere, averaged over top 3 m. Produced using the SiBCASA model, initialised with with spatially varying permafrost carbon density from the NCSCDv2 data set (Figure 6b from Jafarov and Schaefer, 2016 ) .

Ice sheets and glaciers are very visible and much photographed (e.g. here) elements of the Cryosphere but what about the vast, invisible and buried parts? Around a quarter of the land in the Northern hemisphere remains frozen year round, making up a hugely important part of the cryosphere known as permafrost. Permafrost largely exists at high latitudes (e.g. Siberia and the Canadian Arctic) and t ...[Read More]

The art of surviving a week of conferencing

Kathi Unglert April 12, 2016

Hello everyone! My name is Kathi Unglert and I’m a PhD student in volcanology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. I will be reporting for the Cryospheric Sciences blog during the upcoming EGU General Assembly as part of the “Student Reporter Programme”. With the meeting only a few days away, I thought I’d put together a quick guide how to make the most out of a whole week of confer ...[Read More]

Image of the Week: The Bipolar Seesaw

Nanna B. Karlsson April 8, 2016

Ice core records from the WAIS core showing fast millennial-scale climatic variability. Reprinted by permission from Macmillan (Publishers Ltd: Nature, WAIS Divide Project Members, 2015, vol. 520).

The colourful graphs above show how the climate changed in the period from 65 to 25 thousand years ago when Earth was experiencing an ice age. A wealth of information on the dynamics of our climate is embedded in the curves, especially how the northern and southern hemisphere interact, and how fast climate can change. The figure represents thousands and thousands of hours of work by scientists, te ...[Read More]

What to do at EGU — a guide for early-career scientists

Nanna B. Karlsson April 7, 2016

The Young Scientists' Meeting Corner at the EGU 2015 General Assembly (Credit: EGU/Stephanie McClellan)

Are you going to the EGU General Assembly in Vienna next week? Check out these events for early career scientists. To remind you when and where all these nice events and activities take place, you can directly view and import them in your electronic calendar (Isn’t it wonderful?! :-)) Social event for Early Career Cryosphere Scientists! If you cannot make it to anything else; make it to our ...[Read More]

Image Of The Week – Do My Ice Deceive Me?

Sophie Berger April 1, 2016

F.I.B. in the ice, (credit: the person who took the shot would rather stay anonymous and not tell where the picture was taken sorry)

A few weeks ago, we focussed our image of the week on very particular parts of Antarctica, which display blue ice at the surface. Today we would like to put the spotlight on an even more extreme chromatic phenomenon : the Fyndið ísjaki Brandari (should be pronounced “/fɪːntɪð/ˈiːsjacɪ /ˈprantaːrɪ/“, even though a bit of phonetics never hurt anyone, for the sake of simplicity this phenomenon ...[Read More]