Last January, a study in Nature Climate Change showed the world's glaciers are the smallest they've been in human history, revealing radiocarbon material that hasn't been exposed for 40,000 years. Now, new research published in Nature quantifies how much the world's lost glaciers have contributed to rising sea levels. From …
Last January, a study in Nature Climate Change showed the world's glaciers are the smallest they've been in human history, revealing radiocarbon material that hasn't been exposed for 40,000 years. Now, new research published in Nature quantifies how much the world's lost glaciers have contributed to rising sea levels. From …
NASA's Oceans Melting Greenland (OMG) project has revealed Greenland’s Jakobshavn Glacier, the island’s biggest, is actually growing, at least at its edge. In research published Monday in Nature Geoscience, researchers report that since 2016, Jakobshavn’s ice has thickened slightly, thanks to relatively cool ocean waters at its base—which have caused …
Greenland is melting faster than scientists previously thought, with the pace of ice loss increasing four-fold since 2003, new research has found. The research provides fresh evidence of the dangers posed to vulnerable coastal places as diverse as Bangladesh, Miami, Shanghai and various Pacific islands as climate change shrinks the …
Ice on Greenland is melting four times faster than it did just 16 years ago, a study reports. The melting, which is a result of the Earth's warming atmosphere and oceans, is happening much faster than scientists had thought and will likely lead to faster sea-level rise. "Increasingly, large amounts …
Recent studies note a significant increase in highpressure blocking over the Greenland region (Greenland Blocking Index, GBI) in summer since the 1990s. Such a general circulation change, indicated by a negative trend in the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) index, is generally highlighted as a major driver of recent surface melt …
A domino-like cascade of melting ice, warming seas, shifting currents and dying forests could tilt the Earth into a “hothouse” state beyond which human efforts to reduce emissions will be increasingly futile, a group of leading climate scientists has warned. This grim prospect is sketched out in a journal paper …
Nioghalvfjerdsfjorden is a major outlet glacier in Northeast-Greenland. Although earlier studies showed that the floating part near the grounding line thinned by 30% between 1999 and 2014, the temporal ice loss evolution, its relation to external forcing and the implications for the grounded ice sheet remain largely unclear. By combining …
The early part of the last deglaciation is characterised by a ~40 ppm atmospheric CO2 rise occurring in two abrupt phases. The underlying mechanisms driving these increases remain a subject of intense debate. Here, we successfully reproduce changes in CO2, δ13C and Δ14C as recorded by paleo-records during Heinrich stadial …
Albedo—a primary control on surface melt—varies considerably across the Greenland Ice Sheet yet the specific surface types that comprise its dark zone remain unquantified. Here we use UAV imagery to attribute seven distinct surface types to observed albedo along a 25 km transect dissecting the western, ablating sector of the …
The world’s sea ice shrank to a record January low last month as the annual polar melting period expanded, experts say. The 5.04 million square miles of ice in the Arctic was 525,000 square miles below the 1981-to-2010 ice cover average, making it the lowest January total in satellite records, …
Satellite altimetry has shown that global mean sea level has been rising at a rate of ∼3 ± 0.4 mm/y since 1993. Using the altimeter record coupled with careful consideration of interannual and decadal variability as well as potential instrument errors, we show that this rate is accelerating at 0.084 …
Greenland’s vast ice sheet has long been home to Project Iceworm, an abandoned Cold War-era U.S. Army initiative designed to deploy ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads against the Soviet Union. When the project was shuttered in 1967, military planners expected that any materials left on site would be safely frozen …
Moulins permit access of surface meltwater to the glacier bed, causing basal lubrication and ice speedup in the ablation zone of western Greenland during summer. Despite the substantial impact of moulins on ice dynamics, the conditions under which they form are poorly understood. We assimilate a time series of ice …
Up to four times more coastal glaciers in Greenland are at risk of accelerated melting than previously thought, say scientists who have mapped the region's coastal seafloor and bedrock beneath its massive ice sheet. Researchers from NASA and the University of California Irvine in the US created the most comprehensive, …
The Arctic marine environment is undergoing a transition from thick multi-year to first-year sea-ice cover with coincident lengthening of the melt season. Such changes are evident in the Baffin Bay-Davis Strait-Labrador Sea (BDL) region where melt onset has occurred ~8 days decade−1 earlier from 1979 to 2015. A series of …
Melting ice is causing coastal waters in Greenland to become less saline, which may in turn affect marine life as well as the global ocean currents that keep Europe warm, a study warns. For the first time, scientists from Aarhus University in Denmark have unveiled the long-term impact of the …
According to local scientists and specialists in Denmark, the population of the dogs – traditionally used for transporting people and goods across Greenland’s vast snowy landscape and also for sled racing – has fallen by more than 50 per cent over the past 20 years Professor Morten Meldgaard of the …
New images have been released of wildfires that continue to burn close to the Greenland ice sheet, on the country's west coast. Fires are rare on an island where 80% of the land is covered by ice up to 3km thick in places. However, satellites have observed smoke and flames …
The rise in global sea levels has accelerated since the 1990s amid rising temperatures, with a thaw of Greenland's ice sheet pouring ever more water into the oceans, scientists said on Monday. The annual rate of sea level rise increased to 3.3 millimetres (0.13 inch) in 2014 - a rate …
A river of meltwater flows over 120-metre wide waterfall in Antarctica Won Sang Lee/Korea Polar Research Institute A new scientific analysis finds that the Earth’s oceans are rising nearly three times as rapidly as they were throughout most of the 20th century, one of the strongest indications yet that a …