climate change

Let’s go to School of Sustainability!

Federica Minotti & Francesco Avanzi September 24, 2021

Logo of School of Sustainability, showing on the background our evident love for the Cryosphere [Credit: FAWLTS]

Next generations will not only see impacts of climate change first-hand, but they will also deal with the associated societal implications. Implementing climate solutions and orienting themselves in a growing, green job market need cutting-edge knowledge, which is often hard to get through the ordinary, high-school syllabus. As early-career cryo-scientists (Federica is a PhD student in glacial geo ...[Read More]

Did you know about Artificial Glaciers?

Giovanni Baccolo August 27, 2021

Figure 1. The Presena glacier in the central Alps (Adamello-Presanella range) is one of the most famous “artificial” glaciers. Here we are in September 2020 and you see a snowcat in the process of removing the white tarps that cover the glacier in summer, visible in its upper part. Is this a glacier or a construction site? [Credits: Giovanni Baccolo]

There are several ways that we can classify glaciers. We can look at their shape, their size, their type of terminus, and many other features. A new characteristic has recently been gaining in popularity: artificiality. Yes, we now have a few artificial glaciers! Have you ever heard about them? They are glaciers whose behavior is directly influenced by human interventions in order to improve their ...[Read More]

The softness of ice, how we measure it, and why it matters for sea level rise

Emma Smith & TJ Young June 25, 2021

Figure: The Scott Polar Research Institute’s beautiful fabric maps show that Antarctica is composed of the combination of many different aspects, including snow, rocks, volcanoes, and biological life. Although the fabric of ice does not refer to material textiles, the analogy is similar in that ice fabric represents the physical composite of all its constituent ice crystals. [Image credit: Derek Langley / Naomi Chapman (SPRI University of Cambridge)]

One of the first things school children learn is that ice is a solid, and forms by freezing water. Most people think of ice as brittle–have you ever dropped a slippery ice cube on the kitchen floor, and watch it break and shatter into many pieces? It may be surprising, then, to find that ice can also stretch and squeeze, like a ball of pizza dough! Once deformed, ice is then softer in certai ...[Read More]

On snowmelt, water security, and a warming climate – Why solution-oriented research matters, now more than ever

Francesco Avanzi & Tessa Maurer April 9, 2021

1 April 2015: for the first time on record, the chief of the California Cooperative Snow Surveys, Frank Gehrke, had no snow to measure at the Phillips Snow Course near Lake Tahoe at the end of the winter. This was in some ways unsurprising, as California had been in a drought since 2012. But drought was nothing new in the state, and this was the first time on record that snow was completely absent ...[Read More]

Climate Change and Cryosphere – What can we learn from the smallest, most vulnerable glaciers in the Ötztal Alps?

Markus Strudl March 19, 2021

The Alps were the first mountains to be studied from a glaciological point of view in the 19th century and they host some of the most studied glaciers of Earth. Some of them are found in the Central Alps and in particular, the Ötztal Alps. Just to cite the most known and largest glaciers in this Alpine sector, we can mention Hintereisferner or Vernagtferner. But in the Ötztal Alps you can also fin ...[Read More]

Did you know that glacier mass loss affects water resources?

Larissa van der Laan March 5, 2021

The picture above shows a typical Kyrgyz summer yurt camp, located in the valley of Altyn-Arashan, Kyrgyzstan. The stream you see flowing through comes from the glacier-fed lake of Ala-Kul, the gorgeous turquoise water featured below. The families who live there during summer have done so for generations, and travel up with their herds of horses and cows. The stream provides the water they need fo ...[Read More]

Time To Reflect

Samuel Cook December 11, 2020

Albedo or albedon’t? One possible solution to global warming is to turn everything white to increase the planet’s albedo, i.e. how reflective it is (see, for example, this website). A higher albedo would be one way to reduce global warming, by reducing the amount of incoming shortwave solar radiation absorbed by the planet’s surface, which is then re-emitted as longwave radiation that ...[Read More]

The physical and social changes facing the mountainous populations of the Karakoram Range

Shakir Ahmed October 23, 2020

View of Central Hunza valley with lush vegetation. Photo credit: Anas-Najam on unsplash.com.

As a child, Shakir remembers long extreme winters with heavy snowfall and dry blistering winds, where it was hard to play outside. He grew up in a village named Gulmit, located at an elevation of 2500 m, surrounded by the high snow caped mountains in the Karakoram Range in northern Pakistan. That was 30 years ago, when climate change was still not a cause of concern for the local people. Today, in ...[Read More]

Did you know… the Andes are so cryo-diverse?

Lucas Ruiz June 19, 2020

Extending for almost 8,000 km along the west of South America, the Andes are the longest continental mountain range in the world. They portray an impressive richness and diversity of cryospheric features, including: the most substantial extension of tropical glaciers on Earth, one of the highest densities of rock glaciers, the largest glacierized area in the Southern Hemisphere outside Antarctica, ...[Read More]

Does debris cover offset glacier retreat in the Greater Caucasus?

Levan Tielidze April 3, 2020

Figure 1: Supra-glacial debris cover (SDC) change on the Elbrus Massif from 1986 to 2014. A SPOT-7 image is used as the background. Blue shows retreat of clean-ice parts. Clean ice in 1986 consists of the clean ice in 2014 (grey, transparent) plus clean-ice area that retreated between 1986 and 2014 (dark blue). Credit: Tielidze et al., 2020

In this week’s blog, Levan Tielidze tells us about supra-glacial debris cover change for the Greater Caucasus. His recent study indicates more than a doubling in the area of supra-glacial debris cover for the Elbrus Massif‘s glaciers from 1986 to 2014, the largest glacierized massif in the whole region. Glaciers on the western slope of the Elbrus Massif are affected by avalanches and thus ar ...[Read More]