Posts tagged as:

Arctic

A beginner’s guide to the importance of Arctic sea ice

by Gareth7 October 2009

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In this beginner’s guide Tom Wagner, NASA’s cryosphere programme manager, outlines why studying Arctic sea ice is important, illustrating his talk with some great graphics. Meanwhile, the NSIDC has announced the final figures for September’s sea [...]

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Arctic takes a Turney for the worse

by Bryan Walker25 September 2009

British geologist Chris Turney is just back from fieldwork in Svalbard, the island archipelago situated halfway between Norway and the North Pole. He has written about it in his popular science blog, under the title A Warning From the North. I’ll draw attention to some of his main points here, but first a reminder [...]

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Third

by Gareth18 September 2009

The National Snow and Ice Data Centre announced today that this year’s Arctic sea ice minimum extent was likely to have been reached on September 12. It’s the third lowest minimum in the record, behind 2007 and 2008. The image at left shows this year in white, compared with 2007 in darker colours. From the [...]

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Titanic days

by Gareth11 September 2009

Awesome (defined as extremely impressive or daunting; inspiring great admiration, apprehension, or fear) time-lapse pictures of the calving face of the great glacier at Ilulisat, Greenland pouring ice into the ocean — the single biggest ice discharge of any northern hemisphere glacier. Greenlanders reckon this is where the iceberg that sank the Titanic originated. The [...]

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More than a metre

by Bryan Walker10 September 2009

Sea level will rise by more than a metre by 2100 according to the authors of the third chapter in the World Wide Fund for Nature’s new Arctic report, introduced by Gareth a few days ago. Eric Rignot, one of the two authors of the chapter, is principal scientist for the Radar Science and Engineering [...]

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(Arctic) Change is now

by Gareth5 September 2009

The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) has just published a new report on climate change in the Arctic — Arctic Climate Feedbacks: Global Implications [PDF], and it’s a fascinating read. Over the last two years I’ve blogged regularly on the changes being seen in the Arctic — sea ice reductions, melting of the [...]

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And now the bad news…

by Gareth18 August 2009

Active methane plumes over the West Spitsbergen shelf discovered last summer are being driven by warming of an ocean current over the last 30 years, a new study(*) reports. The team on the British research vessel the James Clark Ross from the National Oceanography Centre Southampton (working with scientists from the University of Birmingham, Royal [...]

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Wouldn’t it be ice

by Gareth29 July 2009

Pictures from my new favourite blog, Meltfactor.org, where Jason Box of the Byrd Polar Research Centre at Ohio State is posting from the Greenpeace expedition to the Petermann glacier in NW Greenland. The pictures are stunning (above shows fracturing on the end of the ice tongue) — and the insight to what’s going up there [...]

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On an island

by Gareth24 July 2009

NASA’s Earth Observatory is without doubt one of my favourite web sites. As I write, the above view of sea ice off Baffin Island (or a version of it) is their Image of the Day, and aside from the obvious beauties of the swirls of melting sea ice (memorably described in a comment at RealClimate [...]

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First we lose Manhattan…

by Gareth16 July 2009

It looks as though the Petermann Ice Tongue in northern Greenland is about to lose another major chunk of ice. This New Scientist video (accompanying text here) shows a team working on the tongue, documenting events as they happen. They expect a major break-up event within weeks:

When this happens, an island of ice the size [...]

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