Dear Friends of the Cryosphere Pavilion and Cryosphere Capsule Readers! We are happy to announce that the COP31 Cryosphere Pavilion side event application process is now open! We plan to carry forward the cryosphere’s message towards urgent ambition with another strong array of policy-relevant side events at in Antalya, Türkiye November 9-20. Side event applications […]
Nature Communications, 21 July 2026 Rising sea levels driven by ocean warming and ice sheet melt are projected to substantially increase coastal flood risk across the United Kingdom, with implications for long-term adaptation and population relocation. Using high-resolution flood models and sea-level rise scenarios extending to 2300, the study found that, regardless of future emissions, […]
Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans, 26 June 2026 East Antarctica has long been considered less vulnerable to ocean-driven ice loss than West Antarctica, but latest research shows that some of its ice shelves are highly exposed to warming surface waters. Using a high-resolution model, this study examined the Denman-Shackleton ice shelf, where much of the […]
Geophysical Research Letters, 9 July 2026 Antarctic Bottom Water (AABW) is the cold, dense water formed around Antarctica that sinks to the deepest parts of the ocean. It helps drive global ocean circulation and stores large amounts of heat and carbon, buffering the pace of atmospheric warming. This study combined satellite observations with direct ocean […]
PNAS, 20 July 2026 After several years in the early 2020s when Arctic winter sea ice appeared to stabilize, satellite observations showed exceptionally low winter sea ice extent during 2025 and 2026, indicating that this pause was temporary. The study analyzed more than four decades of satellite observations, focusing on two key phases of the […]
Nature Communications, 16 July 2026 Temporarily exceeding global warming targets increases the risk of long-lasting changes to critical Earth systems, including the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) and Arctic permafrost. The AMOC is a major system of Atlantic Ocean currents that carries heat northward. Warming and increased freshwater from melting ice can weaken this circulation, […]
Science Advances, 19 June 2026 Including estimates of Greenland Ice Sheet melt in climate models increases the projected weakening of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) by up to 40% by 2300 under a high-emissions scenario. Most models already project some level of AMOC slowdown with continued fossil fuel emissions and planetary warming. However, most […]
Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans, 10 July 2026 As the Antarctic ice sheet and surrounding ice shelves lose ice, they release increasing amounts of freshwater into the Southern Ocean, altering circulation there as well as globally, potentially influencing the global climate system. To better understand these effects, researchers modeled how projected Antarctic meltwater affects major […]
Science Advances, 15 April 2026 Climate projections that incorporate real-world ocean observations indicate that the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) could weaken by 42-58% by 2100 with low to moderate emissions (SSP2-4.5), a much stronger decline than the ~32% weakening projected by the standard average across climate models. By comparing models with observed ocean conditions, […]
Science Advances, 8 April 2026 Observations from four long-term underwater monitoring arrays in the North Atlantic show evidence of a weakening in the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) over the past two decades. These observations show a consistent decline in deep western overturning transport – a measure of large-scale ocean circulation that reflects the strength […]
Communications Earth & Environment, 3 February 2026 Increased atmospheric river activity funneling moisture from the tropics, combined with reduced Antarctic sea ice extent, has increased snowfall across parts of Antarctica over the past decade, temporarily shifting the continent toward a very subtle net mass gain since 2020. This has occurred despite increasing ice loss from […]
Nature Reviews Earth & Environment, 7 April 2026 The latest assessment of mountain glaciers by the World Glacier Monitoring Service (WGMS) finds that in 2025, all 19 major glacier regions across the world experienced net ice loss for the fourth year in a row. The largest losses occurred in Western North America, Central Europe, and […]
Major losses from Earth’s ice sheets and mountain glaciers can occur at temperatures well below 1.5°C. Lead authors of two 2025 papers – one on ice sheets, the second on glaciers – urged governments in a press conference at SB62 in June 2025 to adopt far more ambitious climate commitments to prevent the worst impacts. […]
PNAS, 6 July 2026 Antarctic ice shelves act as natural barriers that slow the flow of land ice into the ocean. As fractures develop and deepen, these ice shelves become weaker, allowing glaciers to flow faster and increasing Antarctica’s contribution to sea-level rise. Most current ice-sheet models do not account for this process. Using a […]
Nature Climate Change, 10 June 2026 Human-driven sea-level rise is transforming once-rare “extreme sea-level events” into more frequent coastal hazards, increasing the risk of flooding, infrastructure damage, and coastal erosion worldwide. This study combined more than a century of global tide measurements with climate models to determine how much human-driven sea-level rise has increased the […]