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“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]
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]
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]
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]
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]
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]
This is it! The new European horizon 2020 project on Oldest Ice has been launched and the teams are already heading out to the field, but what does “Old Ice” really mean? Where can we find it and why should we even care? This is what we (Marie, Olivier and Brice) will try to explain somewhat. Why do we care about old ice, ice cores and past climate? Unravelling past climate and how it responded to ...[Read More]
Looking out over the sea on a quiet day with no wind, the word “flat” would certainly pop up in your mind to describe the sea surface. However, this serene view of a flat sea surface is far from accurate at the global scale. The apparent simplicity behind the concept of sea level hides more complex science that we hope to explain in a simple manner in today’s “For Dummies” post, which will g ...[Read More]
“Tsunami“ is a word that became world famous after the so-called Christmas tsunami in 2004, when enormous waves hit the shores around the Indian Ocean with disastrous consequences for countries such as Sri Lanka, Thailand, Somalia and many others. But did you know that tsunamis can be icy? An ice tsunami is one of the many names associated with ice shoves (or ivu, shore ice override, i ...[Read More]
Who would think that one of the world’s most active volcano shelters the southernmost persistent ice mass in Europe!? Yes, you can find ice inside Mount Etna! Located at an altitude of about 2,040 m above sea level, the Ice Cave (Grotta del Gelo) is well known among Mt Etna’s volcanic caves due to the presence of columns of ice on its walls and floor which occupy about the 30% of the ...[Read More]
