To study how the ocean behaves in the glacial fjords of Antarctica and Greenland, we normally have to go there on big icebreaker campaigns. Or we rely on modelling results, especially so to determine what happens when the wind or ocean properties change. But there is also a third option that we tend to forget about: we can recreate the ocean in a lab. This is exactly what our Bergen-Gothenburg tea ...[Read More]
Image of the Week – The true size of Greenland
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 – Fifty shades of snow
Fig. 1: Green snow [Credit: NASA's Earth Observatory]
When I think of snow, I tend to either think about the bright white ski slopes in the mountains or the large white areas in the Arctic. However, natural phenomena can lead to colorful snow. Our Image of the Week shows snow can be green! Snow can also turn orange, pinkish, grey and even yellow… But where do these different shades of snow come from? White The most common color of snow is white (see ...[Read More]
Image of the Week — High altitudes slow down Antarctica’s warming
When it comes to climate change, the Arctic and the Antarctic are poles apart. At the north of the planet, temperatures are increasing twice as fast as in the rest of the globe, while warming in Antarctica has been milder. A recent study published in Earth System Dynamics shows that the high elevation of Antarctica might help explain why the two poles are warming at different speeds. The Arctic vs ...[Read More]
Image of the Week – The birth of a sea-ice dragon!
Fig. 1: Dragon-skin ice observation in Terra Nova Bay by the Nathan B Palmer research team in April 2017. [Credit: IMAS ].
Dragon-skin ice may sound like the name of an episode of the Game of Thrones fantasy franchise. However, this fantasy name hides a rare and bizarre type of ice formation that you can see in our Image of the Week. It has been recently observed by the “Polynyas, ice production and seasonal evolution in the Ross Sea” (PIPERS) research team in Antarctica. This bizarre phenomenon caused by ...[Read More]
Image of the Week – Ice lollies falling from the sky
You have more than probably eaten many lollipops as a kid (and you might still enjoy them). The good thing is that you do not necessarily need to go to the candy shop to get them but you can simply wait for them to fall from the sky and eat them for free. Disclaimer: this kind of lollies might be slightly different from what you expect… Are lollies really falling from the sky? Eight years ag ...[Read More]
Image of the Week – How geometry limits thinning in the interior of the Greenland Ice Sheet
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
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 rather splendid round-up of CryoEGU!
The 2017 edition of the EGU general assembly was a great success overall and for the cryospheric division in particular. We were for instance thrilled to see that two of the three winning photos of the EGU Photo contest featured ice! To mark the occasion we are delighted to use as our image of this week, one of these pictures, which shows an impressive rapid in the Pite River in northern Sweden. ...[Read More]
Image of the Week — We’re heading for Vienna
A Viennese tram during EGU 2016. Do you recognise the flag on the left? [Credit: F. Lepoudre]
♫ Tatata taaa tatatatata Tatata taaa tatatatatatatata We’re heading for Vienna (Vienna) And still we stand tall ‘Cause maybe they’ve seen us (seen us) And welcome us all, yeah With so many miles left to go And things to be found (to be found) I’m sure that we’ll all miss that so it’s the … ♫ …congratulations, you’ve recognise the song….. ...[Read More]