How do you get a hot water drill onto an ice sheet? The Subglacial Access and Fast Ice Research Experiment (SAFIRE) uses a hot water drill to directly access and observe the physical and geothermal properties where the ice meets rock or sediment at the glacier-bed interface. Here, SAFIRE principal investigator Bryn Hubbard and post-doc …[Read More]
After a train, the London Underground, another train, a flight, three more trains and a taxi (shared with people I had met on my way); I had arrived in a small Alpine village in the very north of Italy. The reason for this rather convoluted journey? To attend the Karthaus Summer School on ice sheets …[Read More]
Deglaciation and formation of an ice rise with the ice-sheet model BISICLES. The simulation starts with an ice sheet in steady state that overrides a topographic high in the bed, close to the calving front. The sea level is then forced to rise steadily with 1 cm per year during 15 thousand years, and the …[Read More]
The margin of the glacier “Hochjochferner” on the border between Austria and Italy. This glacier has been monitored with an Automatic Weather Station for several years by the Institute for Marine and Atmospheric research in Utrecth, NL.It is also the destination of the field trip that takes place during the annual Karthaus summer school in …[Read More]
Climate records from ice cores have helped scientists understand the past changes in climate.The GISP II (Greenland Ice Sheet Project Two) ice core was more than 3km long and was drilled during a five year period in the 1990s. After the drilling ended the casing of the borehole was extended above the surface, so that …[Read More]
In early April 2015, a small team of 2 Belgian and 2 French researchers went to Svalbard. The goal? Testing new methods to measure sea-ice thickness and ice algal biomass, but also measuring greenhouse gases in the sea ice in relation with the ‘STeP’ (Storfjorden Polynya multidisciplinary study) campaign. With funding from the French Polar …[Read More]
This image is from the west coast of Greenland and it shows several glaciers flowing towards the sea (upper part of the image), transporting ice into the ocean. The colours show the velocity of the ice. As the ice gets nearer to the coast it speeds up reaching speeds over 15m/day. The velocities were calculated using two …[Read More]
Going on a cruise for a month sounds tempting for most people and that is exactly how I spent one month of my summer. Instead of sunshine and 25 degrees, the temperature was closer to the freezing point on the thermometer and normal summer weather was replaced by milder weather conditions. The destination of the …[Read More]
Moving 150 tonnes of equipment more than 450km across the Greenland Ice Sheet sounds like a crazy idea. In that context, moving a 14-metre high, dome-shaped, wooden structure seems like a minor point, but it really is not. I do not think I realised what an awesome and awe-inspiring project I was part of, until …[Read More]
What do polar bears and emperor penguins have to do with the Eiffel Tower and Notre Dame? Pole to Paris has the answer. Erlend Moster Knudsen earned his PhD in climate dynamics after four years of research from the University of Bergen, Colorado State University and University of Alaska Fairbanks on Arctic sea ice …[Read More]
