After only two months of PhD at the Laboratoire de Glaciologie of the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB, Belgium), I had the chance to participate in an ice core drilling campaign in the Princess Ragnhild coastal region, East Antarctica, during seven weeks in December 2018 – January 2019 for the Mass2Ant project. Our goal was to collect ice cores to better evaluate the evolution of the surf ...[Read More]
Image of the Week – What’s Hot in the Cryosphere? A 2018 review
In 2018, NASA’s Operation IceBridge captured this image of a tabular iceberg off the coast of the Antarctic Peninsula, leading to a flurry of media excitement. In this blog post, we’ll look at some of the other big scientific discoveries of 2018 in the field of cryospheric sciences [Credit: NASA / Jeremy Harbeck, CC-BY 2.0].
Every year, humanity understands more and more about a remote and unforgiving component of the Earth system – the cryosphere. 2018 has been no exception, and in this blog post we’ll take a look at some of the biggest scientific findings of cryospheric science in 2018. We will then look forward to 2019 and beyond, to see what the future holds for these rapidly changing climate component ...[Read More]
Ice-hot news: The cryosphere and the 1.5°C target
Every year again, the Conference of Parties takes place, an event where politicians and activists from all over the world meet for two weeks to discuss further actions concerning climate change. In the context the COP24, which started this Monday in Katowice (Poland), let’s revisit an important decision made three years ago, during the COP21 in Paris, and its consequences for the state of the cryo ...[Read More]
Image of the Week – (Un)boxing the melting under the ice shelves
Figure 1: Melting underneath Antarctic ice shelves as modelled with the Potsdam Ice-shelf Cavity mOdel (PICO) for present-day ice geometries and ocean conditions. Extending a simple ocean box model approach (Olbers and Hellmer, 2010), it efficiently calculates the wide range of melting in Antarctica [Credit: adapted from Fig. 5 of Reese et al. (2018)]
The Antarctic ice sheet stores a large amount of water that could potentially add to sea level rise in a warming world (see this post and this post). It is currently losing ice, and the ice loss has been accelerating in the past decades. All this is linked to the melting of ice – not at the surface but at the base, underneath the so-called ice shelves which form the continuation of the Antarctic i ...[Read More]
Do clouds affect melting over Antarctic ice shelves?
The Antarctic Peninsula is the ‘canary in the coalmine’ of Antarctic climate change. In the last half-century it has warmed faster than most other places on Earth, and considerable change has consequently been observed in the cryosphere, with several ice shelves collapsing in part or in full. Representing this change in models is difficult because we understand comparatively little abo ...[Read More]
Image of the Week – Oh Sheet!
Fig. 1: Overview of the ISMIP6 framework. Obtain forcing from climate models, project sea-level contributions using ice-sheet models, and explore ice-sheet-climate feedbacks. [Credit : Figure 1 in Nowicki et al., 2016 ]
The Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets are major players in future sea level rise. Still, there is a lot about these ice sheets we do not understand. Under the umbrella of the World Climate Research Programme, the international scientific community is coming together to improve ice sheet modelling efforts to better grasp the implications of climate change for ice sheet evolution, and consequently, ...[Read More]
Image of the Week – The future of Antarctic ice shelves
Climate change will increase ice shelf melting around Antarctica. That’s the not-very-surprising conclusion of a recent modelling study, resulting from a collaboration between Australian and German researchers. Here’s the less intuitive result: much of the projected melting is actually linked to a decrease in sea ice formation. Learn why in our Image of the Week… Different types ...[Read More]
Image of the Week — Quantifying Antarctica’s ice loss
It is this time of the year, where any news outlet is full of tips on how to lose weight rapidly to become beach-body ready. According to the media avalanche following the publication of the ice sheet mass balance inter-comparison exercise (IMBIE) team’s Nature paper, Antarctica is the biggest loser out there. In this Image of the Week, we explain how the international team managed to weight Anta ...[Read More]
Image of the Week – Super-cool colours of icebergs
Fig.1: Clear blue marine ice visible on an upturned iceberg [Credit: Stephen Warren].
It is Easter weekend! And as we do not want you to forget about our beloved cryosphere, we provide you with a picture nearly as colourful as the Easter eggs: very blue icebergs! What makes them so special? This is what this Image of the Week is about… What are icebergs made of? Icebergs are chunks of ice which break off from land ice, such as glaciers or ice sheets (as you’ll know if you rem ...[Read More]
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]