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 …
Scientists have found that vast lakes and streams are widespread on the surface of Antarctica's ice sheets which may accelerate its contribution to the rise in sea-level, a new study suggests. "Our study has found that extensive networks of lakes and streams have persisted in Antarctica for decades which move …
Every spring and summer melt ponds form at the surface of polar sea ice and become habitats where biological production may take place. Previous studies report a large variability in the productivity, but the causes are unknown. Original Source
Unless the world stops burning fossil fuels that are fuelling global warming, irreversible changes in the Arctic could have disastrous effects for the people that live there and for the rest of the planet, researchers warned on Friday. The Arctic’s ecosystems are fundamentally threatened by climate change and other human …
Remote polar and deepwater fish faunas are under pressure from ongoing climate change and increasing fishing effort. However, these fish communities are difficult to monitor for logistic and financial reasons. Currently, monitoring of marine fishes largely relies on invasive techniques such as bottom trawling, and on official reporting of global …
A snow-covered former U.S. army base in Greenland — dubbed “a city under ice” — could leak pollutants into the environment as the climate changes, raising difficult questions over who is responsible for clean-up. In 1959, U.S. army engineers began constructing a futuristic project in northwestern Greenland that might as …
Stromatolite fossils formed around 3,700 million years ago in what is now Greenland predate the previous oldest fossil evidence for life on Earth by more than 200 million years.
Accurate quantification of the millennial-scale mass balance of the Greenland ice sheet (GrIS) and its contribution to global sea-level rise remain challenging because of sparse in situ observations in key regions. Glacial isostatic adjustment (GIA) is the ongoing response of the solid Earth to ice and ocean load changes occurring …
Reconstructing the past variability of Arctic sea ice provides an essential context for recent multi-year sea ice decline, although few quantitative reconstructions cover the Holocene period prior to the earliest historical records 1,200 years ago. Photochemical recycling of bromine is observed over first-year, or seasonal, sea ice in so-called “bromine …
The high Arctic archipelagos around the globe are among the most strongly glacierized landscapes on Earth apart from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. Over the past decades, the mass losses from land ice in the high Arctic regions have contributed substantially to global sea level rise. Among these regions, …
A new study measures the loss of ice from one of world’s largest ice sheets. They find an ice loss that has accelerated in the past few years, and their measurements confirm prior estimates. As humans emit heat-trapping gases, we expect to see changes to the Earth. One obvious change …
The portion of the Greenland ice sheet covering the Cold War–era US military base known as Camp Century — also known as “the city under the ice” — could start to melt by the end of the century, according to new research from CIRES (a partnership between NOAA and the …
In 1959 the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built Camp Century beneath the surface of the northwestern Greenland Ice Sheet. There they studied the feasibility of deploying ballistic missiles within the ice sheet. The base and its wastes were abandoned with minimal decommissioning in 1967, under the assumption they would …
The locally migratory behavior of the high arctic muskox (Ovibos muschatus) is a central component of the breeding and winter survival strategies applied to cope with the highly seasonal arctic climate. However, altered climate regimes affecting plant growth are likely to affect local migration dynamics of the muskox. In this …
The earth is warming at an alarming rate, especially in the Arctic, where a marked decline in sea ice cover may have far-ranging consequences for endemic species. Little auks, endemic Arctic seabirds, are key bioindicators as they forage in the marginal ice zone and feed preferentially on lipid-rich Arctic copepods …
It’s no news that Greenland is in serious trouble — but now, new research has helped quantify just how bad its problems are. A satellite study, published last week in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, suggests that the Greenland ice sheet lost a whopping 1 trillion tons of ice between …
An ancient network of channels which may have taken up to 2.3 million years to form has been found under the Jakobshavn Glacier in Greenland. According to a press release issued by the University of Bristol in the U.K., the team made the discovery by analyzing data collected, in part, …
A glance at the globe might make you wonder why Iceland seems oddly green, while Greenland is covered in ice. There’s even an Internet meme about it. Schoolyard wisdom says this was intentional—Iceland’s Viking settlers thought the name would discourage oversettlement of their verdant island, while nobody cared if people …
On top of the world, by a fjord in western Greenland, a remote hydro power plant is buzzing with extra water from the melt of ancient glaciers. This island at ground zero of global warming is seeking to be one of the few places on Earth to benefit. Outside the …
On top of the world, by a fjord in western Greenland, a remote hydro power plant is buzzing with extra water from the melt of ancient glaciers. This island at ground zero of global warming is seeking to be one of the few places on Earth to benefit. Outside the …
Deep, cold ocean currents from the North Atlantic blunt the effect of global warming on Antarctica and slow the rise of sea levels, according to a study published Monday. This icy insulation of the snowy continent -- covered by a sheath of ice up to four kilometres (2.5 miles) thick …
