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Cryospheric Sciences

414 search results for "sea ice"

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Cryospheric Sciences

Radiocarbon rocks! – How rocks can tell us about the history of an ice sheet…

Radiocarbon rocks! – How rocks can tell us about the history of an ice sheet…

When most people hear the phrase “radiocarbon dating”, they think of measuring carbon to date organic material. But did you know that carbon is also produced within rocks, and that we can use it to learn about the past behaviour of a glacier? About 20,000 years ago it was colder and large parts of the continents were covered by ice. But what did Antarctica – the largest ice mass ...[Read More]

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Cryospheric Sciences

Boom and bust beneath the ice

Boom and bust beneath the ice

Beneath the frozen surface of the Southern Ocean, live some of the most spectacular creatures on earth. These creatures are spectacular not only in appearance, but also in their ability to survive in such an extreme environment as Antarctica. Here, temperatures deviate only slightly from 0°C, and food is scarce during the winter months. How do these diverse creatures live in these conditions and w ...[Read More]

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Cryospheric Sciences

Water plumes are tickling the Greenland Ice Sheet

Water plumes are tickling the Greenland Ice Sheet

7 meters of sea-level rise – what you would get if the whole Greenland Ice Sheet melted. But the tricky question is: how much of this ice will be melted in the next decades, and how fast will it occur? This piece of information is critical in order to plan for present and future populations living in coastline areas, all around the world. How much and how fast can the Greenland Ice Sheet melt ? In ...[Read More]

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Cryospheric Sciences

For Dummies – How do wildfires impact permafrost? [OR.. a story of ice and fire]

For Dummies – How do wildfires impact permafrost? [OR.. a story of ice and fire]

Wildfire – like the ones observed in the Northwest Territories, Canada in 2014 (Fig. 1) – is a natural part of permafrost landscapes, but fires are expected to get more frequent and severe as the climate warms. This could accelerate the degradation of permafrost, with negative consequences on the local and global scale! We have a pretty good understanding of how permafrost responds to fire t ...[Read More]

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Cryospheric Sciences

Ice-hot news: The IPCC Special Report on the Oceans and the Cryosphere under Climate Change

Ice-hot news: The IPCC Special Report on the Oceans and the Cryosphere under Climate Change

You have probably heard the name “Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)” mentioned frequently over the last few years. The IPCC is the United Nations body for assessing science related to climate change and it publishes global assessment reports on this topic every 5 to 10 years. Due to the current urgency of the global climate crisis and the need for more information by decision makers ...[Read More]

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Cryospheric Sciences

Cryo-Comm – Capturing Ice

Cryo-Comm – Capturing Ice

In this week’s blogpost, author, editor, artist, and outreach expert Marlo Garnsworthy gives some insights into her recent trip to Iceberg Alley, gives you some tips on how to communicate icy science, and shows us her inspirational artwork. If you’re reading this, ice may be on your mind. Ice is surely on mine. During my day job as a creative and editor, I dip frequently into Twitter for the lates ...[Read More]

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Cryospheric Sciences

Cryo-adventures – Life and science at a central Greenland ice core drilling camp

Cryo-adventures – Life and science at a central Greenland ice core drilling camp

How do you get there? Where will you sleep? What work will you do there?These are just a few of the many questions I got from family and friends when I told them that I would join the EastGRIP ice core project this summer. As a paleo climate and ice sheet modeller, I could only repeat the abstract information given to me, very conscious that I actually had no idea how it would be to live and work ...[Read More]

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Cryospheric Sciences

Image of the Week – The GReenland OCEan-ice interaction project (GROCE): teamwork to predict a glacier’s future

Image of the Week – The GReenland OCEan-ice interaction project (GROCE): teamwork to predict a glacier’s future

The GROCE project, funded by the German Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF), takes an Earth-System approach to understand what processes are at play for the 79°N glacier (also known as Nioghalvfjerdsfjorden), in northeast Greenland. 79°N is a marine-terminating glacier, meaning it has a floating ice tongue (like an ice shelf) and feeds into the ocean. Approximately 8% of all the ice contain ...[Read More]

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Cryospheric Sciences

Image of the Week – Kicking the ice’s butt(ressing)

Image of the Week – Kicking the ice’s butt(ressing)

Changes in the ice shelves surrounding the Antarctic continent are responsible for most of its current contribution to sea-level rise. Although they are already afloat and do not contribute to sea level directly, ice shelves play a key role through the buttressing effect. But which ice shelf regions are most important for this? The role of ice-shelf buttressing In architecture, the term “buttress” ...[Read More]

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Cryospheric Sciences

Image of the Week — Into Iceberg Alley

Image of the Week — Into Iceberg Alley

Crew in hardhats and red safety gear bustle about, preparing our ship for departure. A whale spouts nearby in the Straits of Magellan, a fluke waving in brief salute, before it submerges again. Our international team of 29 scientists and 2 science communicators, led by co-Chief Scientists Mike Weber and Maureen Raymo, is boarding the JOIDES Resolution, a scientific drilling ship. We’re about to jo ...[Read More]