Nature Communications, September 14 Most of Svalbard’s glaciers and ice caps have lost the porous snow layer that previously protected them from yearly temperature fluctuations. This snow layer was lost below a critical altitude of 450 meters already in the 1980s, which rendered 60% of Svalbard’s ice highly vulnerable to further warming; starting a period […]
Journal of Geophysical Research, July 11 On the other side of the Arctic, an earlier study this summer found that winter storms and warm near‐surface Atlantic water appear directly responsible for winter sea ice loss in the Whalers Bay area north of Svalbard. The amount of heat transported from the Atlantic Ocean, and storm frequency both […]
Science Advances, September 2 Summer sea ice minimums receive the most attention; but Arctic sea ice has been declining year-round, and new reconstructions place the 2018 winter maximum in the Bering Sea as the lowest in at least 5500 years. The 2018 and 2019 maximums were also 60-70% lower than the averages recorded since consistent […]
Journal of Glaciology, August 26 Up to 85% of the glaciers found in the Koshi River Basin could disappear by 2100 under the highest emission scenarios (RCP8.5). The Koshi River, a major tributary of the Ganges has a 50,000 km2 basin (the size of Costa Rica). Over 5% is covered by glaciers, and spreads across India, Nepal, […]
Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service, September 3 Arctic fire emissions – those directly caused by humans, as well as those from natural phenomena such as lightning strikes – already are one-third higher than the 2019 total, which itself broke the previous record. The CO2 released from these fires through the end of August totalled around 244 […]
Nature, August 26 Antarctic ice shelves – floating ice in contact with land ice – are both critical to maintaining ice sheet stability, and vulnerable to catastrophic fracturing from meltwater entering crevasses. Hydro-fracturing occurs when surface meltwater flows into and deepens pre-existing fractures, and is a potential mechanism driving sudden ice shelf collapse, as occurred with […]
The Cryosphere Discussion/Review, August 14 A paper placed in open review notes that the cryosphere globally has lost a total of 28 trillion tonnes of ice (28,000 Gt) in the past 23 years, with a significant acceleration of mass loss since the year 2000. The largest losses have occurred to (in approximate order) Arctic sea […]
Nature Communications, August 24 The floating Shirase Ice Tongue (a long and narrow projection of ice, connected an ice basin about the size of the United Kingdom) in Queen Maud Land, East Antarctica, has revealed surprisingly high basal melt rates of 7 to 16 m per year. These rates equal or surpass the melting rate underneath […]
Nature, August 20 The Greenland Ice Sheet lost a record-breaking 532 (± 58 Gt) of ice in 2019, up around 200 Gt in the early 2000s, when it first became clear that the ice sheet was losing mass. The two GRACE satellite missions also provided new insights on the sensitivity of the Greenland Ice Sheet to climate-related changes in […]
Nature, Communications Earth & Environment, August 13 Acceleration of outlet glaciers from the Greenland ice sheet, not compensated by accumulation above makes it the current largest contributor to sea level rise. Through the 1980s and 1990s, losses through iceberg calving and melting were replaced by snowfall, keeping the ice sheet in balance. However, starting in […]
Nature Geoscience, August 10 Between 1994 and 2018, Antarctic ice shelves (floating ice connected to the land-based Antarctic ice sheet) lost close to 3960 Gt of ice. Many ice shelves bordering Antarctica lose mass through ocean-driven melting at their base. This study builds on previous work by using higher density satellite radar measurements, enabling far […]
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, August 10 Under high emissions scenarios, northern hemisphere permafrost and peatlands will show a 30-50% greater contribution to warming than previously projected, with emissions impacts equivalent to 1% of all anthropogenic radiative forcing this century – and this takes into account both peatland carbon uptake and permafrost thaw […]
Nature Climate Change, August 10 The Arctic Ocean could be seasonally ice-free at temperatures only slightly above today’s, once land-based Arctic summer temperatures average 4 to 5°C above pre-industrial. This would occur by summer 2035 under high emissions scenarios; parts of the Arctic were already far warmer this summer. These new simulations using CMIP6, by […]
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, August 3 Despite recent progress on bending the emissions curve and the global pandemic, cumulative CO2 emissions measured between 2005 and 2020 place us on track (within 1%) of RCP8.5, the most aggressive scenario in assumed fossil fuel use. Between 2030 and 2050, human CO2 emissions will likely […]
The Canadian Geographer, July 16 Outdoor ice-skating is an important cultural pastime in many northern regions and holds a firm foothold in North American identity. Using citizen science data collected in six cities across Canada and the US, researchers estimated backyard skating conditions in past winters for which historical observations do not exist. They found […]
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