CR
Cryospheric Sciences

ice cores

Cryo Comm – Explaining ice core science with “cool” educational videos

May 17, 2024
Cryo Comm – Explaining ice core science with “cool” educational videos
Fig. 1: DEEPICE video series “DEEPICE Stories: insights into ice and climate”. [Credit: Marie Kazeroni]

Mastering the art of science communication is becoming more and more important, especially in the realm of climate science! Training and practice can really help PhD students acquire this skill. With this in mind, the DEEPICE project, a training network of 15 PhD students, has developed a wide range of activities to train the DEEPICE students, including the creation of a series of educational vide ...[Read More]

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
Historic photograph of the ice core drill rig inside a covered snow trench at Camp Century, northwestern Greenland in 1964. Source: Langway, 2008 [Credit: USACE/CRREL].

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]

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

June 25, 2021
The softness of ice, how we measure it, and why it matters for sea level rise
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]

Life of a scientist: When fieldwork doesn’t go to plan…

March 27, 2020

Climate research questions tend to focus on the future. What will global temperature be in 2100? Will extreme weather events become more frequent? When will sea level rise render coastal homes uninhabitable? But our understanding of climate processes first comes from observing the past: palaeoclimatology. To get these records, scientists often go on fieldwork to collect samples. But what happens w ...[Read More]

Image of the Week – Seven weeks in Antarctica [and how to study its surface mass balance]

February 15, 2019

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 – Why is ice colourful?

May 4, 2018
Image of the Week – Why is ice colourful?
Figure 1: Thin sections (~9 cm in height) from Alpine glacier ice at 1 mm thickness before polishing photographed under crossed polarisers [Credit: Johanna Kerch]

When you think of glacier ice, what colour first springs to mind? Maybe white, blue or transparent? Well, glacier ice can, in fact, be mesmerising and multi-coloured! Our image of the week shows thin sections of glacier ice under polarised light. These sections were cut from block samples of two Alpine glaciers in Switzerland (Chli Titlis and Grenzgletscher).   In these images the individual ice c ...[Read More]