GeoLog

Cryospheric Sciences

Imaggeo on Mondays: Pitter-patter of little paws in Patomsky crater

This week’s Imaggeo on Mondays is brought to you by Dmitry Demezhko, who describes how Patomsky crater may have formed and why it keeps scientists puzzling… Patomsky crater, also known as Patomskiy crater or the Patom cone, sits in the Irkutsk Region of Eastern Siberia. The site is a curious cone with a crater at the top and a small mound in the center. The cone totals some 39 metres in height and ...[Read More]

Imaggeo on Mondays: Moulding Malaspina’s moraines

There are many different types of glaciers, each defined by where they’re located and how they terminate. Piedmont glaciers are those that flow out from a confining valley and spill out into the open, forming wide lobes. This one is Malaspina Glacier, which spreads out over the Seward Ice Field. Stretching 45 kilometres over the lowlands towards the sea, and spanning some 65 kilometres across, Mal ...[Read More]

Imaggeo on Mondays: A feast of pancakes

The thought of pancake ice always makes me a little hungry – I just can’t help thinking about stacks of syrup-drowned pancakes, or crepes covered wish sugar and doused with lemon juice – but the science of pancake ice is quite a tempting topic too! Pancake ice occurs in areas where ice formation is repeatedly disturbed by water movement. In the Southern Ocean, the water extremely open and the swel ...[Read More]

Imaggeo on Mondays: Carving polar canyons

This week Ian Joughin, a research scientist from the Polar Science Center at the University of Washington, takes us on the polar express to put glacial processes into perspective and find out what makes a moulin… This canyon formed when a melt lake on the surface of the Greenland Ice Sheet overflowed and created a stream that extended out toward a crevasse field. This outflow stream filled a creva ...[Read More]