glacier retreat

A chunk of ice the size of Amsterdam: how the calving of Greenland’s glaciers has changed since the 2010 Petermann Glacier event

Alka Tripathy-Lang August 4, 2023

Thirteen years ago, a roughly 251 km2 chunk of ice (or 97 miles2) broke off Greenland’s Petermann Glacier. This Amsterdam-sized piece of ice was the largest to calve in the Arctic since 1962. The massive iceberg traversed the Nares Strait, which lies between Canada’s Ellesmere Island and Greenland, and into the northern part of Baffin Bay—the northwestern-most arm of the Atlantic Ocean, before eve ...[Read More]

Glacial lake outburst floods: What we know about this destructive ice hazard

Gillian D'Souza October 7, 2022

Glacial lake outburst floods are among the most concerning consequences of retreating glaciers in mountain ranges around the world. Although the phenomenon isn’t a new one, it has increasingly become the focus of research efforts in the last two decades, with many scientists seeing these floods as an emblematic symptom of climate change. This blog sheds some light on this lesser-known geological e ...[Read More]

Imaggeo on Mondays: Glacier de la Pilatte

Alexis Merlaud August 8, 2016

The relentless retreat of glaciers, globally, is widely studied and reported. The causes for the loss of these precious landforms are complex and the dynamics which govern them difficult to unravel. So are the consequences and impacts of reduced glacial extent atop the world’s high peaks, as Alexis Merlaud, explains in this week’s edition of Imaggeo on Mondays. This picture was taken on 20 August ...[Read More]

The final days of the mountain glaciers

Hazel Gibson May 11, 2016

In 1896 British lawyer, mountaineer and author Douglas Freshfield climbed an obscure mountain in the Caucasus called Kasbek and in his book detailing his adventures he described the mountain: “From this point the view of Kasbek is superb: its whole north-eastern face is a sheet of snow and ice, broken by the steepness of the slope into magnificent towers, and seamed by enormous blue chasms.” D Fre ...[Read More]

Imaggeo on Mondays: The retreating glaciers of the Svaneti Range, Georgia

Laura Roberts-Artal January 18, 2016

Today’s Imaggeo on Mondays picture shows the central section of the Svaneti Range, located in the Svaneti Region – a historic province of northwestern Georgia. The range is the second biggest range formed by the modern glaciation on the southern slopes of the Georgian Caucasus Mountains. In today’s post, Levan Tielidze, a researcher at Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University, writes about the ...[Read More]

Imaggeo on Mondays: An ancient landscape and the never setting sun.

Laura Roberts-Artal December 8, 2014

This week’s Imaggeo on Mondays image is brought to you by Florian Heinlein, a meteorologist by training now working on his PhD modelling water transport in agricultural plants. This image was taken even before he started his bachelor’s degree and studying the Earth’s atmosphere and climate change was still a pipeline dream. This picture was taken during a holiday trip through the Baltics in July 2 ...[Read More]

Geosciences Column: Climate-impact studies and their importance in a world of climatic uncertainty

Sara Mynott October 9, 2013

A new hydrological climate-impact study by Nina Köplin and colleagues, in the European Geosciences Union journal Hydrology and Earth System Sciences, investigates the impacts of climate change on forest expansion and glacier retreat in Switzerland. This study raises important questions as to whether or not land cover changes should be considered as climate change impacts on hydrological systems, N ...[Read More]