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Cryospheric Sciences

414 search results for "sea ice"

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Cryospheric Sciences

A year at the South Pole – an interview with Tim Ager, Research Scientist

April 6, 2017
A year at the South Pole – an interview with Tim Ager, Research Scientist

What is it like to live at the South Pole for a year?  A mechanical engineer by trade, Tim Ager, jumped at the opportunity to work for a year as a research scientist at Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station.  When not traveling on various adventures he lives in Austin, Texas, and recently took the time to answer a few questions about his time at Pole. What goes on at Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station? ...[Read More]

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Cryospheric Sciences

Image of the Week – Ice on Fire (Part 2)

March 24, 2017
Image of the Week – Ice on Fire (Part 2)

This week’s image looks like something out of a science fiction movie, but sometimes what we find on Earth is even more strange than what we can imagine! Where the heat of volcanoes meets the icy cold of glaciers strange and wonderful landscapes are formed.  The Kamchatka Peninsula, in the far East of Russia, has the highest concentration of active volcanoes on Earth. Its climate is cold due ...[Read More]

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Cryospheric Sciences

Image of The Week – Ice Flows!

March 17, 2017
Image of The Week – Ice Flows!

Portraying ice sheets and shelves to the general public can be tricky. They are in remote locations, meaning the majority of people will never have seen them. They also change over timescales that are often hard to represent without showing dramatic images of more unusual events such as the collapse of the Larsen B Ice Shelf.  However, an app launched in the summer at the SCAR (Scientific Committe ...[Read More]

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Cryospheric Sciences

Image of The Week – The Pulsating Ice Sheet!

March 3, 2017
Image of The Week – The Pulsating Ice Sheet!

During the last glacial period (~110,000-12,500 years ago) the Laurentide Ice Sheet (North America) experienced rapid, episodic, mass loss events – known as Heinrich events. These events are particularly curious as they occurred during the colder portions of the last glacial period, when we would intuitively expect large-scale mass loss during warmer times. In order to understand mass loss m ...[Read More]

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Cryospheric Sciences

Image of the Week — The ice blue eye of the Arctic

February 24, 2017
Image of the Week — The ice blue eye of the Arctic

“Positive feedback” is a term that regularly pops up when talking about climate change. It does not mean good news, but rather that climate change causes a phenomenon which it turns exacerbates climate change. The image of this week shows a beautiful melt pond in the Arctic sea ice, which is an example of such positive feedback. What is a melt pond? The Arctic sea ice is typically non-smooth, and ...[Read More]

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Cryospheric Sciences

Image of the Week – Icelandic glaciers monitored from space!

February 17, 2017
Image of the Week – Icelandic glaciers monitored from space!

Located in the North Atlantic Ocean, just south of the polar circle, Iceland is a highly fascinating land. Covered by some of the largest glaciers in Europe and hosting active volcanoes, geothermal sites and subglacial lakes, it is extremely dynamic in nature and ever changing. With this Image of the Week we will tell you a bit about the changing ice caps of Iceland and how we can monitor them fro ...[Read More]

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Cryospheric Sciences

Image of the Week – On the tip of Petermann’s (ice) tongue

January 27, 2017
Image of the Week – On the tip of Petermann’s (ice) tongue

5th August 2015, 10:30 in the morning. The meeting had to be interrupted to take this picture. We were aboard the Swedish icebreaker Oden, and were now closer than anyone before to the terminus of Petermann Glacier in northwestern Greenland. But we had not travelled that far just for pictures… Petermann’s ice tongue Petermann is one of Greenland’s largest “marine terminating glaciers”. As the name ...[Read More]

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Cryospheric Sciences

Ice Cores “For Dummies”

December 14, 2016
Ice Cores “For Dummies”

Ice cores are important tools for investigating past climate as they are effectively a continuous record of snowfall, which preserves historical information about climate conditions and atmospheric gas composition. In this new “For Dummies” post, we discuss the history and importance of ice-core science, and look at the way we can use ice core chemistry to reconstruct past climate. Ice sheets, arc ...[Read More]

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Cryospheric Sciences

Image of the Week – What an ice hole!

November 25, 2016
Image of the Week – What an ice hole!

Over the summer, I got excited… the Weddell Polynya was seemingly re-opening! ”The what?” asked my new colleagues. So today, after brief mentions in past posts, it is time to explain what a polynya is. Put it simply, a polynya, from the Russian word for “ice hole”, is a hole in the sea-ice cover. That means that in the middle of winter, the sea ice locally and naturally opens and reveals the ocean ...[Read More]

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Cryospheric Sciences

Image of the Week – Goodness gracious, great balls of ice!

November 18, 2016
Image of the Week – Goodness gracious, great balls of ice!

At first glance our image of the week may look like an ordinary stoney beach…but if you look more closely you will see that this beach is not, in fact, covered in stones or pebbles but balls of ice! We have written posts about many different weird and wonderful ice formations and phenomena (e.g. hair ice or ice tsunamis) here at the EGU Cryosphere blog and here is another one to add to the l ...[Read More]