Cryospheric Sciences

Image of the Week – Icy expedition in the Far North

Clara Burgard June 8, 2018

Fig.1: Mooring in the fjord next to Qaanaaq [Credit: Measurement campaign team].

Many polar scientists who have traveled to Svalbard have heard several times how most of the stuff there is the “northernmost” stuff, e.g. the northernmost university, the northernmost brewery, etc. Despite hosting the four northernmost cities and towns, Svalbard is however accessible easily by “usual-sized” planes at least once per day from Oslo and Tromsø. This is not the case for th ...[Read More]

Image of the Week — Climate change and disappearing ice

Sophie Berger November 10, 2017

The first week of the Climate Change summit in Bonn (COP 23 for those in the know) has been marked by Syria’s decision to sign the Paris Accord, the international agreement that aims at tackling climate change. This decision means that the United States would become the only country outside the agreement if it were to complete the withdrawal process vowed by President Trump. In this context ...[Read More]

Image of the Week – The true size of Greenland

Sophie Berger October 6, 2017

Greenland is a critical part of the world, which is regularly covered on this blog, because it hosts the second largest ice body on Earth – the Greenland Ice Sheet. This ice sheet, along with its small peripheral ice caps, contributes by 43% to current sea-level rise. However, despite being the world’s largest island Greenland, appears disproportionately large on the most common world maps (Fig. 2 ...[Read More]

Image of the Week: Petermann Glacier

Laurence Dyke September 29, 2017

Our image of the week shows the area around the calving front of Petermann Glacier through the spring, summer, and autumn of 2016. Petermann Glacier, in northern Greenland, is one of the largest glaciers of the Greenland Ice Sheet. It terminates in the huge Petermann Fjord, more than 10 km wide, surrounded by 1000 m cliffs and plunging to more than 1100 m below sea level at its deepest point. In 2 ...[Read More]

Image of the Week – A new way to compute ice dynamic changes

David Docquier August 4, 2017

Up to now, ice sheet mass changes due to ice dynamics have been computed from satellite observations that suffer from sparse coverage in time and space. A new method allows us to compute these changes on much wider temporal and spatial scales. But how does this method work? Let us discover the different steps by having a look at Enderby Land in East Antarctica, for which ice velocities are shown i ...[Read More]

Image of the Week – Summer is fieldwork season at EastGRIP!

Helle A. Kjær July 14, 2017

Fig.1: The sleeping quarters at EastGRIP [Credit: Helle Astrid Kjær].

As the days get very long, summer is a popular season for conducting fieldwork at high latitudes. At the North East Greenland Ice Stream (NEGIS), the East Greenland Ice-core Project (EastGRIP) is ongoing. Several scientists are busy drilling an ice core through the ice sheet to the very bottom, in continuation to previous years (see here and here). This year, amongst others, several members from t ...[Read More]

Image of the Week – How geometry limits thinning in the interior of the Greenland Ice Sheet

Denis Felikson May 26, 2017

Figure 1: (a) Mass change of the Greenland ice sheet measured by NASA’s GRACE mission in cm/yr water equivalent from January 2003 to December 2013 [Credit: modified from Velicogna et al., 2014]. (b) Dynamic surface elevation change and mass loss along the margin of West Greenland as measured by DEM differencing. The map shows surface elevation change from 1985 to present for 16 outlet glaciers. Circles represent mass change (estimated using 917 kg m-3 as ice density) with circle areas proportional to magnitude of mass change. [Credit: Denis Felikson]

The Greenland ice sheet flows from the interior out to the margins, forming fast flowing, channelized rivers of ice that end in fjords along the coast. Glaciologists call these “outlet glaciers” and a large portion of the mass loss from the Greenland ice sheet is occurring because of changes to these glaciers. The end of the glacier that sits in the fjord is exposed to warm ocean water that can me ...[Read More]

Image of the Week – Antarctica’s Flowing Ice, Year by Year

George Roth May 12, 2017

Today’s Image of the Week shows annual ice flow velocity mosaics at 1km resolution from 2005 to 2016 for the Antarctic ice sheet. These mosaics, along with similar data for Greenland (see Fig.2), were published by Mouginot et al, (2017) last month as part of NASA’s MEaSUREs (Making Earth System Data Records for Use in Research Environments) program. How were these images constructed? The mosaics s ...[Read More]

Image of the Week – A high-resolution picture of Greenland’s surface mass balance

Brice Noël April 14, 2017

Fig. 1: Surface mass balance (SMB) of the Greenland ice sheet and peripheral ice caps at 1 km resolution averaged for 1958-2015. The interior of the ice sheet (blue) accumulates mass from snowfall whereas the narrow margins (red) lose mass from runoff of meltwater. Yellow dots locate on-site measurements. At this resolution, the small ice caps and marginal glaciers are accurately resolved [Credit: Brice Noël]. Click here here to enlarge the image.

The Greenland ice sheet – the world’s second largest ice mass – stores about one tenth of the Earth’s freshwater. If totally melted, this would rise global sea level by 7.4 m, affecting low-lying regions worldwide. Since the 1990s, the warmer atmosphere and ocean have increased the melt at the surface of the Greenland ice sheet, accelerating the ice loss through increased runoff of meltwater and i ...[Read More]

Image of the Week – On the tip of Petermann’s (ice) tongue

Céline Heuzé January 27, 2017

Petermann's ice tongue. [Credit: C. Heuzé]

5th August 2015, 10:30 in the morning. The meeting had to be interrupted to take this picture. We were aboard the Swedish icebreaker Oden, and were now closer than anyone before to the terminus of Petermann Glacier in northwestern Greenland. But we had not travelled that far just for pictures… Petermann’s ice tongue Petermann is one of Greenland’s largest “marine terminating glaciers”. As the name ...[Read More]