You’ve probably heard of supermodels like Heidi Klum and Kate Moss, but have you heard of SUMO? It’s an abbreviation for a project called Super Modeling by Combining Imperfect Models, and although it doesn’t sound nearly as glamorous, it may mean big things for climate modeling. This innovative approach, pioneered by an interdisciplinary group of scientists from around the world, seeks to build on ...[Read More]
Climate: Past, Present & Future
Imaggeo on Mondays: Alas, allases are abound!
The Lena River flows throughout Russia from its source in the Baikal Mountains out into the Arctic Ocean, where the delta’s landscape is dominated by ice-rich Yedoma and thermokarst lakes. Thermokarst lakes have been identified as a source of carbon release to the atmosphere and Yedoma-like lake sediments are known to release more methane than any other sediment due to their incredibly high carbon ...[Read More]
Sussing out sea level rise
Ocean thermal expansion, that is, the increase in water volume due to temperature alone, is relatively well understood – as is the retreat of both mountain glaciers and ice caps. While most models simulate these effectively, there is little understanding of how both the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets will respond to climate change. This is because the full extent of ice-ocean interactions is n ...[Read More]
Geosciences Column: The contribution of climate change to water scarcity in the MENA region
In this month’s Geoscience’s column, Alex Stubbings discusses the water scarcity problems in the Middle East and North Africa region and the recent developments in modelling water resources here. The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region is considered the most water-scarce region in the world. As such, the region faces a multitude of challenges in the 21st century including population growt ...[Read More]
Imaggeo on Mondays: Storm in Mount Waddington
This week’s Imaggeo on Mondays is brought to you by the photographer herself, Marion Bisiaux (now at Stendhal University, Grenoble, France), who tells us about her exciting field trip to the British Columbia’s Coast Range. This picture was taken during the Waddington Range Ice Core Project in which I participated during my PhD at the University of Nevada, Reno, US and at the Desert Research Instit ...[Read More]
Imaggeo on Mondays: Melting ice
The speed and extent of Greenland’s ice sheet melt dominated the media over the summer, and for good reason. Dramatic satellite images showed that, in just a few days, 97% of the island’s ice sheet surface thawed, melting over a larger area than at any time in more than 30 years of satellite observations. Usually, during the summer only around half of the surface of Greenland’s ice sheet melts and ...[Read More]
Imaggeo on Mondays: Ellesmere Island
Located within the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, Ellesmere Island is the world’s tenth largest island and features Canada’s most northerly point but little else apart from vast landscapes of pristine natural habitat. It is separated from Greenland only by the Nares Strait, a major pathway for sea ice flushing out of the High Arctic. Belonging to the Canadian territory of Nunavut, Ellesmere’s perman ...[Read More]
Imaggeo on Mondays: The power of ice
There has been a lot of talk about Greenland lately in the context of global climate change. And for good reason. Over 80% of its total surface is covered by ice, the volume of which exceeds 2,850,000 km3 or enough to raise global sea levels by a staggering 7 m if fully melted. The Greenland ice sheet consists of layers of compressed snow from over 100,000 years of snowfall. As a result, ice cores ...[Read More]
Geosciences Column: Human-induced changes in the ocean’s salinity and temperature fields
In this month’s Geosciences column, Mona Behl discusses a recent paper on the effects of anthropogenically-induced climate change on the planet’s oceans. A recent study led by scientists at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, University of California San Diego, suggests that observed changes in ocean salinity are inconsistent with natural climate variations and can be attributed to human ...[Read More]
Imaggeo on Mondays: Blue haze
In this week’s Imaggeo on Mondays, brought to you by the photographer himself, Lukas Hörtnagl (University of Innsbruck, Austria) tells us about the ‘blue haze’ or ‘tule fog’ of California’s Sequoia National Park. I was visiting the United States to attend the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union in December 2011 and decided to stay four more weeks to visit some of the National Parks in C ...[Read More]