CR
Cryospheric Sciences

418 search results for "sea ice"

CR
Cryospheric Sciences

Cryo Adventures – Droning on glaciers and ice caps in Kyrgyzstan

June 17, 2022
Cryo Adventures – Droning on glaciers and ice caps in Kyrgyzstan

Drones are not only a cool toy to play with. They are also a useful instrument to monitor and study glaciers and ice caps. By taking thousands of images flying above the ice, we can make 3D models of ice masses at centimetre resolution. Using drones, we can now survey small to medium sized glaciers and ice caps in unprecedented detail. In recent years, we have conducted several surveys on glaciers ...[Read More]

CR
Cryospheric Sciences

Ice-hot news: A cryo-summary of the new IPCC assessment report!

May 13, 2022
Ice-hot news: A cryo-summary of the new IPCC assessment report!

We have waited eight years for it, and it is finally out: the 6th Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (a.k.a. « IPCC AR6 »)! And it is more than 10,000 pages long across Working Groups! Fortunately, a synthesis report integrating the findings of all three working groups should be released in Autumn 2022. However, we, at the EGU Cryosphere Blog, thought it might be us ...[Read More]

CR
Cryospheric Sciences

Camp Century re-visited: sediment from the bottom of a Cold War ice core reveals Greenland’s warm past

January 28, 2022
Camp Century re-visited: sediment from the bottom of a Cold War ice core reveals Greenland’s warm past

A Cold War nuclear-powered military base inside the Greenland Ice Sheet sounds like science fiction, but the science that came out of this U.S. army installation was anything but fiction. In last week’s EGU CR blog post, Paul Bierman and Amanda Schmidt discussed the advances made by the U.S. military in operating across the Greenland Ice Sheet that culminated in the establishment of Camp Century i ...[Read More]

CR
Cryospheric Sciences

Living IN the Greenland ice sheet: the story of Sites I and II, Camp Century’s older, smaller siblings

January 21, 2022
Living IN the Greenland ice sheet: the story of Sites I and II, Camp Century’s older, smaller siblings

Greenland, cold as it is, was appropriately front and center in the Cold War. Strategically placed between Europe and North America, the United States sought to maintain and enhance its position on the island so that American missiles and bombers were in striking range of many Soviet targets. Soviet bombers and missiles coming toward North America would streak over Greenland making early warning c ...[Read More]

CR
Cryospheric Sciences

Climate Change & the Cryosphere: Fjord sediments reveal how melting ice impact the marine ecosystem

January 7, 2022
Glacier debris ice floating in a bay

It is scary how fast the Greenland Ice Sheet is melting and how much freshwater it is discharging to the coastal areas around Greenland. This freshening is having a serious impact to coastal marine primary production, which is the foundation of the Arctic marine food web. Now, because of increased melting and freshwater discharge, we need to understand how coastal ecosystems will react. How will A ...[Read More]

CR
Cryospheric Sciences

Will the ice break out? – a story from the farthest north ice trails

November 26, 2021
Man on snow machine looks bake to the canoe he is towing across ice.

"For over two decades, the sea ice group at the University of Alaska has worked with the community of Utqiaġvik, establishing an integrated observing network. This network includes local observations, a coastal radar system to monitor ice conditions, an in-situ mass balance site monitoring environmental change such as ice growth and snow cover, and the mapping of community sea ice trails." In thi ...[Read More]

CR
Cryospheric Sciences

Climate change and the Cryosphere – With ice we are also losing a piece of our cultural heritage: a glaciologist’s perspective

November 5, 2021
Climate change and the Cryosphere – With ice we are also losing a piece of our cultural heritage: a glaciologist’s perspective

Glaciers are shrinking and disappearing in many regions of the Earth. Did you know? I am joking of course. We are flooded with news talking about this. The decline of glaciers has manifold and severe consequences and is one of the most powerful icons of climate change. Here I want to talk a little bit about one of the less talked about impact of glacier decline: the loss of culture and knowledge r ...[Read More]

CR
Cryospheric Sciences

Will the Arctic be ice free earlier than previously thought?

September 17, 2021
Will the Arctic be ice free earlier than previously thought?

There is no doubt that the Arctic is currently losing its sea ice as our climate is warming. And this process will carry on as temperatures continue climbing. But the rate at which sea ice will melt in the future and the exact date when the Arctic will be free of sea ice is not known due to several factors (which will be briefly discussed in this post). Torben Koenigk and I have selected climate m ...[Read More]

CR
Cryospheric Sciences

Image of the week – The hidden ice of mountainous regions

July 9, 2021
Image of the week – The hidden ice of mountainous regions

When speaking about glaciers and the ice they contain, we generally picture large, clean, and therefore relatively white mountain glaciers… But did you know about rock glaciers? From our Image of the Week, you might notice that they do not quite look like the classic ice glacier you might have had in mind. Indeed, they actually indicate the presence of mountain permafrost, an often poorly understo ...[Read More]

CR
Cryospheric Sciences

Questions from space: what is snow and what is ice on the Greenland ice sheet?

July 2, 2021
Questions from space: what is snow and what is ice on the Greenland ice sheet?

We usually think of a glacier as a white, clean surface. Well, this is only an idealized vision because in reality glaciers are far from immaculate, they can be colored! And this is extremely important since colored (dirty) ice absorbs more solar radiation than clean ice, accelerating melt. One of the places on Earth where it is fundamental to understand these processes is Greenland, where ice is ...[Read More]