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The Arctic Ocean surface is darkening as its sea-ice cover is shrinking. The exact processes driving the ongoing sea-ice loss are far from being totally understood. In this post, we will investigate the different causes of the recent retreat of the Arctic sea-ice cover, using the most updated literature… Arctic sea ice is disappearing Due …[Read More]
![Image of the Week – On thin [Arctic sea] ice](https://blogs.egu.eu/divisions/cr/wp-content/uploads/sites/17/2018/10/kayak.webp)
Perhaps the most enduring and important signal of a warming climate has been that the minimum Arctic sea ice extent, occurring each year in September, has declined precipitously. Over the last 40 years, most of the Arctic sea ice has thus been transformed to first-year ice that freezes in the winter and melts in the …[Read More]
Last week we celebrated Antarctica Day, 50 years after the Antarctic Treaty was signed. This treaty includes an agreement to protect Antarctic ecosystems. But what if, unintentionally, this protection also covered clues of life beyond Earth? In this Image of the Week, we explore how meteorites found in Antarctica are an important piece of the …[Read More]
When I ask school children or people who only know about sea ice from remote references in the newspapers: ‘How thick do you think is the Arctic sea ice?’, I often get surprising answers: ’10 meters? No, it must be thicker – 100 meters!’. It seems like sea ice, often depicted as a uniform white …[Read More]
In the last fifty years, models and observations have enabled us to better understand sea-ice processes. On the one hand, global climate models have been developed, accounting for the sea-ice component in the climate system. On the other hand, satellite instruments have been developed to monitor the “real” sea-ice evolution. These satellite observations are often …[Read More]
In an earlier post, we talked briefly about below-ground ice and the consequences of its disappearing. However, to estimate the consequences of disappearing ground ice, one has to know that there actually is ice in the area of study. How much ice is there – and where is it? As the name suggests, below-ground …[Read More]
Dragon-skin ice may sound like the name of an episode of the Game of Thrones fantasy franchise. However, this fantasy name hides a rare and bizarre type of ice formation that you can see in our Image of the Week. It has been recently observed by the “Polynyas, ice production and seasonal evolution in the …[Read More]
The Arctic sea-ice extent has declined in the past 20 years and its future is uncertain. In the end, greenhouse gas emissions will determine the impact on the sea-ice from man-made climate change through radiative forcing (i.e. Representative Concentration Pathways or RCPs). The COP21 can determine the path we will follow and which course we will take to …[Read More]
Context On the eve of the COP21, it is of paramount importance to recall how strongly the cryosphere is affected by Climate Change. Today, we present the impact of melting ice on sea level rise, as it is presented in the latest assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Quick facts -Since 1992, …[Read More]
This illustration shows two Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images taken over sea ice in the Arctic Ocean. Both images are polarimetric and the different colours reflect the different polarimetric channels of the SAR (red = VV, green = HV and blue = HH). The two images are from the two satellites “ALOS-2” and “RADARSAT-2”. These …[Read More]
