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Cryospheric Sciences

408 search results for "sea ice"

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Cryospheric Sciences

Image of the Week – Geothermal heat flux in Antarctica: do we really know anything?

March 23, 2018
Image of the Week – Geothermal heat flux in Antarctica: do we really know anything?

Geothermal heat flux is the major unknown when we evaluate the temperature and the presence/absence of water at the bed of the Antarctic Ice Sheet. This information is crucial for the Beyond Epica Oldest Ice project, which aims to find a continuous ice core spanning 1.5 million years (see this previous post). A lot of work has been done* to determine geothermal heat flux under the entire Antarctic ...[Read More]

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Cryospheric Sciences

Image of the Week – Broccoli on Kilimanjaro!

March 16, 2018
Image of the Week – Broccoli on Kilimanjaro!

On the plateau of Kilimanjaro, Tanzania, the remnants of a glacier can be found and the ice from that glacier contains a rather interesting feature – Broccoli! Not the vegetable, but bubbles that look a lot like it. Our Image of the Week shows some of these strange “Broccoli Bubbles”. Read on to find out more about where these were found and how we can see them. There is not much ice left on the m ...[Read More]

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Cryospheric Sciences

Image of the Week – The world in a grain of cryoconite

February 23, 2018
Image of the Week – The world in a grain of cryoconite

Microbes growing on glaciers are recognized for their importance in accelerating glacier melting by darkening their surface and for maintaining biogeochemical cycles in Earth’s largest freshwater ecosystem. However, the microbial biodiversity of glaciers remains mysterious. Today, new DNA sequencing techniques are helping to reveal glaciers as icy hotspots of biodiversity. To see a world in a grai ...[Read More]

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Cryospheric Sciences

Image of the week – Skiing, a myth for our grandchildren?

February 16, 2018
Image of the week – Skiing, a myth for our grandchildren?

Ski or water ski? Carnival season is typically when many drive straight to the mountains to indulge in their favorite winter sport. However, by the end of the century, models seem to predict a very different future for Carnival, with a drastic reduction in the number of snow days we get per year. This could render winter skiing something of the past, a bedtime story we tell our grandchildren at ni ...[Read More]

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Cryospheric Sciences

Image of the Week – Karthaus Summer School 2017

October 13, 2017
Image of the Week – Karthaus Summer School 2017

Glaciologists often undertake fieldwork in remote and difficult to access locations, which perhaps explains why they happily travel to similar locations to attend meetings and workshops. The Karthaus Summer School, which focuses on Ice Sheets and Glaciers in the Climate System, is no exception. The idyllic village of Karthaus, located in the narrow Schnalstal valley in Südtirol (Italy), has been h ...[Read More]

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Cryospheric Sciences

Mapping the bottom of the world — an Interview with Brad Herried, Antarctic Cartographer

October 11, 2017
Mapping the bottom of the world — an Interview with Brad Herried, Antarctic Cartographer

Mapping Earth’s most remote continent presents a number of unique challenges. Antarctic cartographers and scientists are using some of the most advanced mapping technologies available to get a clearer picture of the continent. We asked Brad Herried, a Cartographer and Web Developer at the Polar Geospatial Center at the University of Minnesota, a few questions about what it’s like to do this unique ...[Read More]

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Cryospheric Sciences

Image of the Week – The true size of Greenland

October 6, 2017
Image of the Week – The true size of Greenland

Greenland is a critical part of the world, which is regularly covered on this blog, because it hosts the second largest ice body on Earth – the Greenland Ice Sheet. This ice sheet, along with its small peripheral ice caps, contributes by 43% to current sea-level rise. However, despite being the world’s largest island Greenland, appears disproportionately large on the most common world maps (Fig. 2 ...[Read More]

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Cryospheric Sciences

Image of the week – Learning from our past!

September 1, 2017
Image of the week – Learning from our past!

Understanding the climate evolution of our planet is not an easy task, but it is essential to understand the past if we are to predict the future! Historic climate cycles provide us with a glimpse into a period of time when the Earth was warmer than it was today. Our image of the week looks at these warmer periods of time to see what they can tell us about the future! For example, during the Plioc ...[Read More]

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Cryospheric Sciences

Image of the Week – Drilling into a Himalayan glacier

July 28, 2017
Image of the Week – Drilling into a Himalayan glacier

How water travels through and beneath the interior of debris-covered glaciers is poorly understood, partly because it can be difficult to access these glaciers at all, never mind explore their interiors. In this Image of the Week, find out how these aspects can be investigated by drilling holes all the way through the ice… Hydrological features of debris-covered glaciers Debris-covered glaciers ca ...[Read More]

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Cryospheric Sciences

Image of the Week – When the dirty cryosphere destabilizes!

June 16, 2017
Image of the Week – When the dirty cryosphere destabilizes!

Ice is usually something you see covering large ocean areas, mountain tops and passes or as huge sheets in polar regions. This type of ice is clearly visible from space or with the naked eye. There is, however, a large volume of ice that is less visible. This ice is distributed over the polar and high alpine permafrost regions; and is the ice hidden below ground. It might be hidden, but that doesn ...[Read More]