The winter 2016-2017 has been one of the hottest on record in the Arctic. In our Image of the Week, you can see that air temperatures were positive in the middle of the winter! Let’s talk about the reasons and implications of this warm Arctic winter. But first, let’s take a tour in Svalbard, the gateway to the Arctic… A breach in the one of the world’s largest seed vaults The Global S ...[Read More]
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Cryospheric Sciences
Image of the Week – Climate Change and the Cryosphere
While the first week of COP22 – the climate talks in Marrakech – is coming to an end, the recent election of Donald Trump as the next President of the United States casts doubt over the fate of the Paris Agreement and more generally the global fight against climate change. In this new political context, we must not forget about the scientific evidence of climate change! Our figure of the week, tod ...[Read More]
Cryospheric Sciences
Water Masses “For Dummies”
Polar surface water, circumpolar deep water, dense shelf water, North Atlantic deep water, Antarctic bottom water… These names pop in most discussions about the ice-ocean interaction and how this will change in a warming climate, but what do they refer to? In our second “For Dummies” article, we shall give you a brief introduction to the concept of “water mass”, explain how to differentiate water ...[Read More]
Cryospheric Sciences
Image of The Week – 100 years of Endurance!
The 30th August 2016 marks 100 years since the successful rescue of all (human) member of Shackleton’s Endurance crew from their temporary camp on Elephant Island (see map). Nearly a year prior to their rescue they were forced to abandon their ship – The Endurance – after it became stuck in thick drifting sea ice, known as pack ice, trying to navigate the Weddell Sea. It was the last major e ...[Read More]
Cryospheric Sciences
Image of the week – The winds of summer (and surface fluxes of winter)
Antarctica is separated from the deep Southern Ocean by a shallow continental shelf. Waters are exchanged between the deep ocean and the shallow shelf, forming the Antarctic cross-shelf circulation: Very dense waters leave the shelf as Antarctic Bottom Water (AABW) that will then flow at the bottom of all oceans. Meanwhile, relatively warm water from the Southern Ocean, Modified Circumpolar Deep W ...[Read More]
Cryospheric Sciences
European Space Agency Living Planet Symposium 2016
Living Planet Symposium Between the 9th and 13th May, Prague played host to the European Space Agency’s (ESA) fourth Living Planet Symposium. The event, the largest in its history with over 3300 attendees, brought together the earth observation community across multiple disciplines to discuss significant scientific results and the future developments of earth observation missions. Earth Observatio ...[Read More]
Cryospheric Sciences
Image of the Week – Monitoring icy rivers from space!
Why? When a river freezes over, it changes the amount of water that flows through the river system. River ice affects many of the world’s largest rivers, and in the Northern Hemisphere, approximately 60% of rivers experience significant seasonal effects. The formation and evolution of river ice changes river discharge and is not only of interest to local ice skating enthusiasts. The variations in ...[Read More]
Cryospheric Sciences
Filling the Gap between Science and Politics
Have you ever wondered how results from scientific studies make their way into policy and influence government decisions? Read about the experiences of Sammie Buzzard, University of Reading, who spent her summer working for a government body in Westminster, London, UK. This summer I had the opportunity to take some time away from my usual Ph.D. work and spend 3 months working for the Government Of ...[Read More]
Cryospheric Sciences
Camping on the Svalbard coast
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 Institute (IPEV) and IPSL and logistical arrangements by t ...[Read More]
Cryospheric Sciences
Cruising for mud: Sediments from the ocean floor as a climate indicator
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 cruise was the western Nordic Sea and the east Greenland Margin. The ice2ice cruise wa ...[Read More]