Drawing inspiration from popular stories on our social media channels, major geoscience headlines, as well as unique and quirky research, this monthly column aims to bring you the latest Earth and planetary science news from around the web. Major stories Latest IPCC report puts the oceans and cryosphere in focus Last month the United Nations’ …[Read More]
Roughly 50 million years ago, the Eurasian and Indian continental plates began to crash into each other, dramatically changing the landscape of modern-day Asia. The force of the collision caused the Earth to scrunch together at the zone of impact, subsequently forming the Himalayan mountain range. However, to the north of the crash, a stretch …[Read More]
Sentinel-2B imaged the highest mountains of western Europe, just the moment an airplane was about to fly over the granite peaks of Grandes Jorasses and cross the border from France to Italy. The passengers on the right side of the plane must have enjoyed a spectacular view on Mont Blanc, just nine kilometers away to …[Read More]
The winter season is a good time to take advantage of cold weather activities, whether that’s hitting the ski slopes or warming up by a fire, but for Renato R. Colucci, it’s also one of the best time’s to study the Earth’s underground cryosphere. Colucci, who took this featured photograph, is a researcher at Italian …[Read More]
Geotalk is a regular feature highlighting early career researchers and their work. In this interview, we caught up with Christo Buizert, an assistant professor at Oregon State University in Corvallis, who works to reconstruct and understand climate change events from the past. Christo’s analysis of ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica helped reveal links between …[Read More]
These ethereal, twisted ice sculptures litter the frozen shoreline of Tempelfjorden, Svalbard, giving the landscape an otherworldly feel and creating a contrast with the towering ice cliff of the glacier and the mountains behind. They are natural flotsam, the scoured remnants of icebergs calved from the Tunabreen glacier, washed up on the shoreline. These icebergs …[Read More]
The occurrence of sporadic permafrost in the Alps often needs challenging fieldwork in order to be investigated. Here in the high altitude karstic plateau of Mt. Canin-Kanin (2587 m asl) in the Julian Alps (southeastern European Alps) several permanent ice deposits have been recently investigated highlighting how also in such more resilient environments global warming …[Read More]
Geotalk is a regular feature highlighting early career researchers and their work. In this interview we speak to Mathieu Morlighem, an associate professor of Earth System Science at the University of California, Irvine who uses models to better understand ongoing changes in the Cryosphere. At the General Assembly he was the recipient of a 2018 …[Read More]
This photograph shows landforms on Coraholmen Island in Ekmanfjorden, one of the fjords found in the Norwegian archipelago, Svalbard. These geomorphic features were formed by Sefströmbreen, a tidewater glacier, when it surged in the 1880s. Although all glaciers flow, some glaciers undergo cyclic changes in their flow. This is called surging, and glaciers that surge are called …[Read More]
Where in the world can you find some of Earth’s oldest ice? That is the question a team of French and US scientists aimed to answer. They recently identified spots in East Antarctica that likely have the right conditions to harbor ice that formed 1.5 million years ago. Scientists hope that obtaining and analysing an …[Read More]
