cryosphere – Desdemona Despair

Atmospheric and wildfire responses to soil moisture reduction in the idealized experiments using the CESM2. The values represent differences between the response of a 40% soil moisture reduction perturbation experiment in July 2045 and a control simulation: (a) soil moisture in 0–10 cm depth (units: kg/m2), (b) surface air temperature (units: °C), (c) relative humidity at 2 m (units: %), and (d) logarithm of burned area [log (burned area)] (units: km2). Time evolution over Western Siberia (65.5°N, 83.75°E): (e) soil moisture over 0–10 cm depth (units: kg/m2), (f) surface air temperature (units: °C), (g) relative humidity at 2 m (units: %), and (h) logarithm of the burned area [log (burned area)] (units: km2) (blue: control simulation, yellow: 20% soil moisture reduction perturbation experiment, and brown: 40% soil moisture reduction perturbation experiment). Graphic: Kim et al., 2024 / Nature Communications

October 5, 2024

Abrupt intensification of northern wildfires due to future permafrost thawing – “These climate conditions lead to rapid intensification of wildfires in western Siberia and Canada in the mid-to-end of the 21st century”

25 September 2024 (IBS Center for Climate Physics) – A study, published in the journal Nature Communications by an international team of climate scientists and permafrost experts shows that, according to new climate computer model simulations, global warming will accelerate permafrost thawing and as a result lead to an abrupt intensification of wildfires in the Subarctic and […]

Glaciologist at ETH Zurich and Head of the Glacier Monitoring in Switzerland (GLAMOS) Matthias Huss check his equipment on the Rhone glacier amid climate change in Obergoms, Switzerland, 27 August 2024. Photo: Denis Balibouse / REUTERS

October 5, 2024

Swiss glacier melt exceeds average in 2024 after hot summer – “This will be a disaster for Swiss glaciers”

By Denis Balibouse and Cecile Mantovani 1 October 2024 ZURICH (Reuters) – Swiss glaciers melted at an above-average rate in 2024 as a blistering hot summer thawed through abundant snowfall, monitoring body GLAMOS said on Tuesday. Earlier this year, glaciologists had celebrated heavy winter and spring snow dumps in the Alps, hoping this would signal […]

Charles Alexie and Gerald Tom near visible coastal erosion that encroaches on Newtok village in Alaska, on 16 August 2024. Erosion and melting permafrost have largely destroyed Newtok, eating about 70 feet (21.34 meters) of land every year. Photo: Rick Bowmer / AP

October 1, 2024

Climate change destroyed an Alaska village. Its residents are starting over in a new town – “Alaska Native economic, social, and cultural ways of being, which have served so well for millennia, are now under extreme threat due to accelerated environmental change”

By Rick Bowmer and Mark Thiessen 28 September 2024 MERTARVIK, Alaska (AP) – Growing up along the banks of the Ninglick River in western Alaska, Ashley Tom would look out of her window after strong storms from the Bering Sea hit her village and notice something unsettling: the riverbank was creeping ever closer. It was […]

Map showing geomorphological data and icefield reconstruction of the Juneau Icefield for the “Little Ice Age” (LIA) maximum. Graphic: Davies, et al., 2024 / Nature Communications

July 5, 2024

Melting of Alaska’s Juneau Icefield accelerates, losing snow nearly 5 times faster than in the 1980s – “When you go there the changes from year-to-year are so dramatic that it just hits you over the head”

By Seth Borenstein 2 July 2024 (AP) – The melting of Alaska’s Juneau icefield, home to more than 1,000 glaciers, is accelerating. The snow covered area is now shrinking 4.6 times faster than it was in the 1980s, according to a new study. Researchers meticulously tracked snow levels in the nearly 1,500-square mile icy expanse going back […]

Aerial view of researchers for the Dutch startup company, Arctic Reflections, as they pump 900 gallons per minute of water for hours at a time to create a layer of ice on the Arctic sea ice. Photo: The Wall Street Journal

June 23, 2024

Scientists working on desperate plan to refreeze Arctic

By Sharon Adarlo 8 June 2024 (Futurism) – It sounds pretty out-there: to save the snowy Arctic from melting away due to global warming, some scientific experts have been working on plans to hack the entire region’s climate. This doesn’t entail popping the North Pole into an unfathomably large deep freezer like so much ground […]

Satellite view of Antarctica’s Brunt Ice Shelf, showing an Isle of Wight-sized iceberg that broke away in May 2024. Satellite imagery shows clear water all around the berg (outlined in red). It is the third such block to calve near the base in the past three years. Photo: British Antarctic Survey

May 28, 2024

Isle of Wight-size iceberg breaks from Antarctica – “This latest calving reduces the Brunt Ice Shelf to its smallest observed size”

By Jonathan Amos 21 May 2024 (BBC News) – Another big iceberg has broken away from an area of the Antarctic that hosts the UK’s Halley research station. It is the third such block to calve near the base in the past three years. This new one is not quite as large, but still measures […]

Diagrams showing parameters for the collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC). (A) The AMOC strength at 1000 m and 26°N, where the yellow shading indicates observed ranges (60, 61). The cyan-colored lines indicate the magnitude of FH. The red arrow indicates the AMOC tipping point (model year 1758; fig. S1, A and B), and the blue sections indicate the 50-year periods used in (B) to (D). Inset: The hosing experiment where fresh water is added to the ocean surface between 20°N and 50°N in the Atlantic Ocean (+FH) and is compensated over the remaining ocean surface (−FH). The black sections indicate the 26°N and 34°S latitudes over which the AMOC strength and freshwater transport (FovS) are determined, respectively. (B to D) AMOC streamfunction (Ψ) and Atlantic meridional heat transport (MHT; see also fig. S2) for model years 1 to 50, 1701 to 1750, and 2151 to 2200. The contours indicate the isolines of Ψ for different values. Graphic: Van Westen, et al., 2024 / Science Advances

May 27, 2024

Marker for the collapse of key Atlantic current discovered – “We are approaching the tipping point”

By Stephanie Pappas 9 February 2024 (Live Science) – Scientists have discovered a key warning sign before a crucial Atlantic current collapses and plunges the Northern Hemisphere into climate chaos. The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) carries warm water north from the Southern Hemisphere, where it releases heat and freezes. The freezing process concentrates salt […]

Effects of experimental open-top chamber (OTC) warming on ecosystem respiration (ER). Experimental warming increased ER across the tundra biome but the magnitude of the response varied across time and space. Effect of OTC warming on ER Hedges’ SMD calculated as (mean ER of the warmed plots − mean ER of the control plots)/pooled standard deviation across the 136 growing season datasets (that is, unique experiment × ER measurement year combinations). On the top of the graph, a blue diamond shows the mean estimate (est. = 0.57 and 95% CI [0.44–0.70], error bars) of the ER response across the 136 datasets, as well as the Q value testing for heterogeneity and P value from the meta-analysis. Black dots represent ER Hedges’ SMDs of individual datasets and 95% CIs (black error bars) in alphabetical and chronological order. Individual datasets are represented by the experiment ID in black (left) and ER measurement year (right) in a colour scale ranging from dark blue, light blue, orange to red which represents increasingly longer warming duration at the time of ER measurements. Experiments with more than 1 year of ER data are grouped. See Supplementary Tables 1, 2 and 4 for details on the datasets and SMD and CI values. The black dashed vertical line (SMD = 0) represents no change in ER with warming whereas the areas to the right and left of it represent increased (SMD > 0) versus decreased (SMD

April 28, 2024

Understanding climate warming impacts on carbon release from the tundra – “We anticipate an increase in respiration across the whole Arctic and alpine tundra”

By Sara-Lena Brännström 17 April 2024 (Umeå University) – A team of over 70 scientists from different countries used so called open-top chambers (OTCs) to experimentally simulate the effects of warming on 28 tundra sites around the world. OTCs basically serve as mini-greenhouses, blocking wind and trapping heat to create local warming. The warming experiments […]

Annual global mean surface temperature anomalies relative to 1850–1900. Global mean near-surface temperature in 2023 was 1.45 ± 0.12 °C above the 1850–1900 average. The analysis is based on a synthesis of six global temperature datasets. 2023 was the warmest year in the 174-year instrumental record in each of the six datasets. The past nine years – from 2015 to 2023 – were the nine warmest years on record. The two previous warmest years were 2016, with an anomaly of 1.29 ± 0.12 °C, and 2020, with an anomaly of 1.27 ± 0.13 °C. Globally, every month from June to December was record warm for the respective month. September 2023 was particularly noteworthy, surpassing the previous global record for September by a wide margin (0.46 °C–0.54 °C) in all datasets. The second-highest margin by which a September record was broken in the past 60 years (the period covered by all datasets) was substantially smaller, at 0.03 °C–0.17 °C in 1983. July is typically the warmest month of the year globally, and thus July 2023 became the warmest month on record. The long-term increase in global temperature is due to increased concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The shift from La Niña, which lasted from mid-2020 to early 2023, to fully developed El Niño conditions by September 2023 likely explains some of the rise in temperature from 2022 to 2023. However, some areas of unusual warming, such as the North-East Atlantic do not correspond to typical patterns of warming or cooling associated with El Niño. Other factors, which are still being investigated, may also have contributed to the exceptional warming from 2022 to 2023, which is unlikely to be due to internal variability alone. Graphic: WMO

April 28, 2024

WMO: Climate change indicators reached record levels in 2023 – “Sirens are blaring across all major indicators. Some records aren’t just chart-topping, they’re chart-busting. And changes are speeding-up.”

19 March 2024 (WMO) – A new report from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) shows that records were once again broken, and in some cases smashed, for greenhouse gas levels, surface temperatures, ocean heat and acidification, sea level rise, Antarctic sea ice cover and glacier retreat. Heatwaves, floods, droughts, wildfires, and rapidly intensifying tropical cyclones […]

Map showing breeding colonies of emperor penguin in Antarctica. In 2023, 14 of the 66 colonies in Antarctica lost some or all of their chicks due to sea ice breakup. Graphic: British Antarctic Survey

April 27, 2024

Emperor penguins suffered mass breeding failures in 2023 amid record low sea ice – “They’ll either freeze to death or they’ll drown”

By Gloria Dickie 25 April 2024 LONDON (Reuters) – Record low sea ice in late 2023 led to breeding failures in one-fifth of Antarctica’s emperor penguin colonies, scientists with the British Antarctic Survey said on Thursday. Emperors – the world’s largest penguin species and one of only two endemic to Antarctica — depend on sea […]