Copernicus Biogeosciences, July 14 Total carbon emissions from widespread wildfires in northeastern Russia reached an all-time record high already in July, still early in the summer fire season. Rising global atmospheric and ground temperatures increase the frequency of these fires, which also accelerate thawing of Siberian permafrost. This releases additional carbon, adding to that released […]

Link to SPM: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/sixth-assessment-report-working-group-i/ IPCC Press Conference and Release of Report, live at 10AM CEST: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z149vLKn9d8&ab_channel=IntergovernmentalPanelonClimateChange%28IPCC%29 The IPCC on Friday, August 6 approved the Summary for Policy Makers (SPM) of the Sixth Assessment (AR6), Working Group I Report (WGI), on the Physical Science of climate change, including observations and projections in cryosphere regions. The SPM […]

The Cryosphere, August 3 Permafrost with high levels of frozen organic carbon has been warming and degrading in many mixed-forest and wetland environments across central Alaska and westwards into the Seward Peninsula. These permanently frozen soils underlie approximately 40 % of the region. Thaw has penetrated deeper each year in the region around Fairbanks since […]

Nature Communications Earth & Environment, August 3 Newly emerging strong winds in the Beaufort Sea region may cause unusually high summer losses of the Arctic’s remaining store of old and thick sea ice. In early January of this year, sudden atmospheric warming over the central Arctic Ocean resulted in widespread and stronger winds over the […]

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, August 10 Two regions of Siberian permafrost seem to be releasing methane that comes from limestone caves or reservoirs, rather than decay of thawed organic material in the permafrost itself. Methane normally is released from permafrost if it thaws under wet conditions, such as from soils under lakes […]

Nature Communications, July 22 On our present climate trajectory, the North Water ecosystem (NOW), a unique open-water ecosystem surrounded by sea ice between the northwestern coast of Greenland and Ellesmere Island in Canada, almost certainly can no longer serve as a winter refuge for keystone High Arctic mammals, or as central fishing and hunting ground […]

Nature Geoscience, July 29 This review paper assesses abrupt changes in climate over the past 30,000 years, and finds that interactions between the cryosphere and oceans produced some of the most dramatic events in this period, with persisting global consequences. Changes in the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), one of Earth’s largest ocean circulation systems, […]

Journal of Geophysical Research, June 30 Glaciers across the Russian Arctic are losing accelerating amounts of ice each year, especially in the western regions; where the Novaya Zemlya glaciers decreased at rates five times that of regions further east between 2010 and 2018. Novaya Zemlya currently dominates sea level rise in the Barents and Kara […]

Nature Communications Earth & Environment, July 15 Model-based projections of Arctic sea ice extent have traditionally lagged behind real-world observations, in part because a large portion of global climate change models do not adequately capture specific Arctic conditions; especially ocean-atmosphere-sea ice interactions and heat transport, as well as measurements of sea ice volume (not just […]

Nature Communications, July 9 The Langhovde ice shelf, 3 km wide is a relatively (for Antarctica) small ice shelf on East Antarctica. Measurements found that the ocean water underneath Langhovde ice shelf is warmer than the in situ freezing point of water by around half a degree or a degree, depending on the season. This […]

Journal of Geophysical Research: Earth Surface, June 18 When an ice sheet loses mass, the pressure it exerts on the underlying Earth surface decreases, leading to a gradual bedrock uplift and an elevation gain that could potentially help stabilize the Antarctic ice sheet, slowing loss and related sea-level rise. In particular, the fast uplift rates […]

Frontiers Earth Science, July 6 The ice resting on top of unfrozen river water – known as “floating” or “serpentine” ice – tends to form in the deeper sections of river channels with thawed riverbed sediment. Conversely, when river water freezes all the way down to the river bottom, the ice stretches out and covers […]

Geophysical Research Letters, June 16 Winter sea ice loss in the Barents-Kara seas, north of Norway and western Siberia, causes local warming in the Arctic and also produces accompanying changes in atmospheric circulation. When ice loss is moderate, this leads to lower temperatures over Eurasia. However, once sea ice loss is sufficiently large and surpasses […]

Nature Communications, July 5 This satellite study confirms that the rate of glacier ice loss has substantially increased in seven climatically different regions, spread across the entirety of Central Asia, since the 1960s. Ice loss rates have more than doubled in the Northern Tien Shan during this time period, and have accelerated nearly as much […]

The Cryosphere, June 29 Across the entire Greenland Ice Sheet, the extent of meltwater reservoirs hidden underneath layers of packed snow and ice increased by 56% from 2018 to 2019. This increase in “buried” lakes was caused by prolonged summer surface melt in conjunction with unusually high temperatures during the autumn. In the southwest region […]