GeoLog

ice sheet

Geosciences Column: The best spots to hunt for ancient ice cores

July 13, 2018
Geosciences Column: The best spots to hunt for ancient ice cores
The shore of Livingston Island from the South Shetland Islands in Antarctica. Photo: Antarctic public transport. Credit: Carsten W. Mueller (distributed via imaggeo.egu.eu)

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 undisturbed sample of ice this old will give them clues about Earth’s ancient clim ...[Read More]

Geosciences Column: Fire in ice – the history of boreal forest fires told by Greenland ice cores.

February 13, 2015

Burning of biomass contributes a significant amount of greenhouses gases to the atmosphere, which in turn influences regional air quality and global climate. Since the advent of humans, there has been a significant increase in the amount of biomass burning, particularly after the industrial revolution. What might not be immediately obvious is that, (naturally occurring) fires also play a part in e ...[Read More]

Imaggeo on Mondays: Carving polar canyons

December 23, 2013

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]

Imaggeo on Mondays: Getting a handle on Greenland’s glaciers

July 8, 2013

The picture below shows several small glaciers surrounding the Greenland ice sheet, in Tassilaq, near Kulusuk, East Greenland. The dark lines are glacial moraines, responsible for the transport of rock material from mountains towards sea. The photographer, Romain Schläppy, highlights that “an important scientific topic consists to place the recent and ongoing Greenland warming in the broader conte ...[Read More]