CR
Cryospheric Sciences

climate change

Image of the Week – Storing water in Antarctica to delay sea-level rise

April 29, 2016
Image of the Week – Storing water in Antarctica to delay sea-level rise
Difference in ice thickness from the initial equilibrium state after 100 years of ice addition (upper panels) and 1000 years after the end of the forcing (lower panels). Two scenarios are shown, 200 km (left panels) and 800 km (right panels) from the coastline, both corresponding to a sea-level mitigation of 10 mm per year (credit: Frieler et al., 2016, fig 3) .

  Sea level rise Sea-level rise is one of the main impacts of the current global warming and its rate has dramatically increased in the last decades (the current rate is about 3 mm per year). Even if greenhouse gas emissions were stopped today, sea level would continue to rise due to the slow Earth climate system response (IPCC, 2013, chap. 13). It is therefore a considerable threat for popul ...[Read More]

Image of The Week – The Ice Your Eyes Can’t See!

April 15, 2016
Image of The Week – The Ice Your Eyes Can’t See!
Figure 1: Soil carbon map of the Northern Hemisphere, averaged over top 3 m. Produced using the SiBCASA model, initialised with with spatially varying permafrost carbon density from the NCSCDv2 data set (Figure 6b from Jafarov and Schaefer, 2016 ) .

Ice sheets and glaciers are very visible and much photographed (e.g. here) elements of the Cryosphere but what about the vast, invisible and buried parts?  Around a quarter of the land in the Northern hemisphere remains frozen year round, making up a hugely important part of the cryosphere known as permafrost. Permafrost largely exists at high latitudes (e.g. Siberia and the Canadian Arctic) and t ...[Read More]

Image of the Week: The Bipolar Seesaw

April 8, 2016
Image of the Week: The Bipolar Seesaw
Ice core records from the WAIS core showing fast millennial-scale climatic variability. Reprinted by permission from Macmillan (Publishers Ltd: Nature, WAIS Divide Project Members, 2015, vol. 520).

The colourful graphs above show how the climate changed in the period from 65 to 25 thousand years ago when Earth was experiencing an ice age. A wealth of information on the dynamics of our climate is embedded in the curves, especially how the northern and southern hemisphere interact, and how fast climate can change. The figure represents thousands and thousands of hours of work by scientists, te ...[Read More]

Image of the Week: Atmospheric CO2 from ice cores

December 9, 2015
Image of the Week: Atmospheric CO2 from ice cores
CO2 concentrations from EPICA and Vostok ice cores. The red bar at the side shows the Mauna Loa measurements. Credit: The IPCC AR 4 report Fig. 6.3

The measurements of atmospheric CO2 levels at Manu Loa, Hawaii read 401.01ppm on the 7th of December this year. To understand the significance of this number, you just need to look at the figure above from the 4th IPCC report. It shows the changes in CO2 concentrations during the past 800,000 years based on ice core measurements. Values have fluctuated between 190ppm and 280ppm. In other words, bo ...[Read More]

Image of the Week — Ice Sheets and Sea Level Rise (from IPCC)

November 27, 2015
Image of the Week — Ice Sheets and Sea Level Rise (from IPCC)
(Upper) Distribution of ice loss determined from Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) time-variable gravity for (a) Antarctica and (b) Greenland, shown in centimetres of water per year (cm of water yr –1 ) for the period 2003–2012. (Lower) The assessment of the total loss of ice from glaciers and ice sheets in terms of mass (Gt) and sea level equivalent (mm). The contribution from glaciers excludes those on the periphery of the ice sheets. (Credit: IPCC (2013), Assessment Report 5, Working Group I, Technical Summary , Figure TS.3, p41)

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, the Glaciers, Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets have risen the sea level by 14 ...[Read More]

Image of the Week : 63 years of the Muir Glacier’s retreat

October 30, 2015
Image of the Week : 63 years of the Muir Glacier’s retreat
Three repeat photos of the Muir Glacier, Alaska taken on 13 August 1941, 4 August 1950 and 31 August 2004 . Credit: U.S. Geological Survey

The Muir is a valley glacier (Alaska) that has significantly retreated over the last 2 centuries. The 3 pictures have the same field of view and record the changes that occurred during the 63 years separating 1941 and 2004. In the 1941, the terminus of the glacier is on the lower right corner of the photo. The Muir is then a tidewater glacier up to 700m thick and is well connected to its tributary ...[Read More]

From the Poles to Paris — An interview with Erlend Moster Knudsen

June 29, 2015
From the Poles to Paris — An interview with Erlend Moster Knudsen

What do polar bears and emperor penguins have to do with the Eiffel Tower and Notre Dame? Pole to Paris has the answer.   Erlend Moster Knudsen earned his PhD in climate dynamics after four years of research from the University of Bergen, Colorado State University and University of Alaska Fairbanks on Arctic sea ice and its interaction with atmospheric circulation. He took some time to answer ...[Read More]