cryosphere – Page 4 – Desdemona Despair

Hubei’s Guanyin Pavilion during the July 2017 flood and the August 2022 drought. Photo: Getty Images

October 21, 2022

Climate change has come for the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter – “There is nothing in world climatic history which is even minimally comparable to what is happening in China”

By Muizz Akhtar 29 September 2022 (Vox) – China just finished one of its most disastrous summers on record, with record-breaking heat, drought, and wildfires leading to water shortages even into the fall. More than 900 million people — or about 64 percent of China’s population — faced brutal heat waves alone, highlighting how much further the nation has to […]

(a) Ocean thermal forcing (shaded areas) at the ocean bottom or 1000 m (whichever is shallower) and annual submarine melt rate (filled squares) at Greenland’s marine-terminating glaciers. The black dotted line shows the 1,000 m isobath and delineates the extent of the continental shelf. The black dashed regions on the ice sheet delineate the hydrological catchments for three large example glaciers: Jakobshavn Isbrae (JI), Helheim (HH) and Kangerdlugssuaq (KG). The five ice sheet regions considered throughout the paper—south (SO), central-west (CW), northwest (NW), northeast (NE) and north (NO)—are delineated by the black ticks. Other labels are the Irminger Sea (Irm), Davis Strait (Dav) and Denmark Strait (Den). Bathymetry is from ref. 42 and ref. 43. (b) Subglacial discharge (x axis, note logarithmic scale) and ocean thermal forcing (y axis) for each marine-terminating glacier. The background shading shows the resulting submarine melt rate. Glaciers are coloured by their regional grouping. The larger squares and error bars show the median and interquartile range for each region, respectively. (c) Submarine melt rate versus grounding line depth by region with fitted linear trends (all significant at the 5% level) as dashed lines. All the results shown in these plots are annually averaged over 1979–2018. Graphic: Slater and Straneo, 2022 / Nature Geoscience

October 21, 2022

Warmer air and warmer water are combining to melt Greenland ice sheet – “This unfortunately adds to the overwhelming body of evidence showing the sensitivity of the Greenland ice sheet to climate change”

By Rachel Koning Beals 17 October 2022 (MarketWatch) – The Greenland ice sheet — one of the two most important glaciers of its kind on Earth — may be even more sensitive to the warming climate than scientists previously thought. The findings, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, shed fresh light on the forces driving ice […]

Percent change in ice volume for Swiss glaciers, 2001-2022. Melt rates in 2022 far exceeded the previous records from the hot summer of 2003. Glaciers in Switzerland lost around 3 cubic kilometres of ice in 2022, more than 6 percent of the remaining volume. By way of comparison, up to now, years with an ice loss of 2 percent have been described as “extreme”. The loss was particularly dramatic for small glaciers. Graphic: M. Huss / Swiss Academy of Sciences

October 21, 2022

2022 heat wave drove unprecedented melt of Swiss glaciers – “2022 was a disastrous year for Swiss glaciers: all ice melt records were smashed by the great dearth of snow in winter and continuous heat waves in summer”

By Jamey Keaten 28 September 2022 GENEVA (AP) – Switzerland’s glaciers are melting like never before, an academic study released Wednesday found, with their ice volume declining by 6% this year amid rising concerns about global warming and a summer heat wave that swept across Europe. The Swiss Academy of Sciences reported that the shrinkage […]

The location of climate tipping elements in the cryosphere (blue), biosphere (green) and ocean/atmosphere (orange), and global warming levels their tipping points will likely be triggered at 1.5°C. Researchers see signs of destabilisation already in parts of the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, in permafrost regions, the Amazon rainforest, and potentially the Atlantic overturning circulation as well. Graphic: Earth Commission / Globaïa

September 25, 2022

World at risk of passing multiple climate tipping points above 1.5°C global warming

8 September 2022 (Stockholm Resilience Centre) – Multiple climate tipping points could be triggered if global temperature rises beyond 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, according to a major new analysis published in the journal Science. Even at current levels of global heating the world is already at risk of passing five dangerous climate tipping points, and risks […]

Greenland ice sheet flow sectors, individual catchments and peripheral ice caps with regional correspondence between annual values of mass balance and accumulation area ratio (AAR). The whiskers and ± quantities indicate ensemble single s.d. The ice sector outlines are after Morlighem, et al., 2017. Graphic: Box, et al., 2022 / Nature Climate Change

September 18, 2022

Glaciers and “zombie ice”: The planet is melting at both poles, research finds – “We are already into dangerous levels of greenhouse gases that will have consequences far beyond 10 inches of sea level rise”

By Matthew Rozsa 7 September 2022 (Salon) – That sea levels will rise as Earth’s ice melts is a prophecy that began to come true long ago, at the dawn of industrial civilization when humans began pumping vast amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Yet the timeline for sea level rise is not yet fully understood, nor do we really […]

Map of Thwaites Glacier shown in Landsat 8 satellite imagery collected in February 2019. The track of the mission of the autonomous underwater vehicle is shown in orange. Changes in grounding line positions of Thwaites Glacier in the recent past shown by colored lines. Graphic: Alastair Graham / University of South Florida

September 7, 2022

Antarctica “doomsday glacier” could raise global sea levels by 10 feet – “Thwaites is really holding on today by its fingernails”

By Li Cohen 6 September 2022 (CBS News) – The loss of a glacier the size of Florida in Antarctica could wreak havoc on the world as scientists expect it would raise global sea levels up to 10 feet. It’s already melting at a fast rate — and scientists say its collapse may only rapidly […]

(a) Annual mean temperature anomalies in the Arctic (66.5∘–90∘N) (dark colours) and globally (light colours) during 1950–2021 derived from the various observational datasets. Temperature anomalies have been calculated relative to the standard 30-year period of 1981–2010. Shown are also the linear temperature trends for 1979–2021. (b) Annual mean temperature trends for the period 1979–2021, derived from the average of the observational datasets. Areas without a statistically significant change are masked out. (c) Local amplification ratio calculated for the period 1979–2021, derived from the average of the observational datasets. The dashed line in (b) and (c) depicts the Arctic Circle (66.5∘N latitude). Graphic: Rantanen, et al., 2022 / Communications Earth and Environment

August 14, 2022

Arctic warming four times faster than rest of Earth – “Something is happening in the Arctic, and it will affect us all”

PARIS, 11 August 2022 (AFP) – The Arctic has warmed nearly four times faster than the rest of the planet over the last 40 years, according to research published Thursday that suggests climate models are underestimating the rate of polar heating. The United Nations’ climate science panel said in a special report in 2019 that […]

Projected forest position in Siberia and tundra area at year 3000 CE for different climate mitigation scenarios and under potential cooling back to 20th-century temperatures after peak temperatures have been reached. The area of tundra changes over time and can only partly recover when temperatures cool and forests recede (plots next of the maps show years 2000–3000 CE). Only tundra areas above the treeline (Walker et al., 2005) are considered. Map projection: Albers Equal Area. Graphic: Kruse and Herzschuh, 2022 / eLife

May 29, 2022

Siberia tundra could virtually disappear by mid-millennium – Larch forests could spread northward at a rate of 30 km per decade – “At this point, it’s a matter of life and death for the Siberian tundra”

25 May 2022 (AWI) – Due to global warming, temperatures in the Arctic are climbing rapidly. As a result, the treeline for Siberian larch forests is steadily advancing to the north, gradually supplanting the broad expanses of tundra which are home to a unique mix of flora and fauna. Experts from the Alfred Wegener Institute […]

Global map showing the highest marine heatwave (MHW) category experienced at each pixel in 2021 (reference period 1982–2011). Light grey indicates that no MHW occurred in a pixel over the entire year. (b) Stacked bar plot showing the percentage of the surface of the ocean experiencing an MHW on any given day of the year. (c) Stacked bar plot showing the cumulative percentage of the surface of the ocean that experienced an MHW over the year. Note: These values are based on when in the year a pixel first experienced its highest MHW category, so no pixel is counted twice. Horizontal lines in this figure show the final percentages for each category of MHW. (d) Stacked bar plot showing the cumulative number of MHW days averaged over the surface of the ocean. Note: This average is calculated by dividing the cumulative sum of MHW days per pixel weighted by the surface area of those pixels. Data: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Optimum Interpolation Sea Surface Temperature (NOAA OISST). Graphic: Robert Schlegel

May 22, 2022

WMO: Four key climate change indicators broke records in 2021 – Past seven years have been the warmest seven years on record – “A dismal litany of humanity’s failure to tackle climate disruption”

GENEVA, 18 May 2022 (WMO) – Four key climate change indicators – greenhouse gas concentrations, sea level rise, ocean heat and ocean acidification – set new records in 2021. This is yet another clear sign that human activities are causing planetary scale changes on land, in the ocean, and in the atmosphere, with harmful and […]

2m surface temperature over Asia on 30 April 2022. Pakistan temperatures soared up to a scorching 49C (120.2F), one of the hottest temperatures ever recorded on Earth in April. Graphic: Climate Reanalyzer

May 3, 2022

Pakistan and India suffer extreme spring heatwaves – “We are living in hell”

By Hannah Ellis-Petersen and Shah Meer Baloch 2 May 2022 DELHI and ISLAMABAD (The Guardian) – For the past few weeks, Nazeer Ahmed has been living in one of the hottest places on Earth. As a brutal heatwave has swept across India and Pakistan, his home in Turbat, in Pakistan’s Balochistan region, has been suffering […]