deglaciation – Page 7 – Desdemona Despair

Satellite view of Humboldt glacier Venezuela in 1985, 2008, and 2019. Photo: Maxar Technologies

September 25, 2019

Hardy scientists trek to Venezuela’s last glacier amid chaos – “More than 50 million people in South America rely on water provision from the Andes”

By Christina Larson and Federica Narancio 24 September 2019 MERIDA, Venezuela (AP) – Blackouts shut off the refrigerators where the scientists keep their lab samples. Gas shortages mean they sometimes have to work from home. They even reuse sheets of paper to record field data because fresh supplies are so scarce. As their country falls […]

Women fetch water from an opening made at a dried-up lake in Chennai, India, on 11 June 2019. Photo: P. Ravikumar / Reuters

August 24, 2019

India is running out of water – “If nothing changes, and fast, things will get much worse, with severe water scarcity on the horizon for hundreds of millions”

By Bill Spindle and Gareth Phillips 19 August 2019 LEH, India (The Wall Street Journal) – The Ladakh region of northern India is one of the world’s highest, driest inhabited places. For centuries, meltwater from winter snows in the Himalayan mountains sustained the tiny villages dotting this remote land. Now, like many other places in […]

Large rivers of melting water form on an ice sheet in western Greenland on 1 August 2019 and drain into moulin holes that empty into the ocean from underneath the ice. The heat wave that smashed high temperature records in five European countries a passed over Greenland, accelerating the melting of the island's ice sheet and causing massive ice loss in the Arctic. Photo: Caspar Haarløv / Into the Ice / AP

August 19, 2019

Bizarre happenings in the Arctic: Lightning, tropical moisture, and more

By Bob Henson 14 August 2019 (Weather Underground) – You’ll have to forgive the Arctic. It’s had a rough summer. Sea ice is running neck and neck with 2012 for the lowest values on record for this time of year. Wildfires are ringing the Arctic, pouring more carbon dioxide into the air than in any comparable period in 17 […]

Satellite views of the Okjökull glacier in Iceland in 1986 and 2019. Data: Landsat / U.S. Geological Survey. Photo: Joshua Stevens / NASA Earth Observatory

August 18, 2019

Iceland commemorates first glacier lost to global warming – “The world that we learned how it was, learned by heart as some kind of eternal fact, is not a fact any more”

By Toby Luckhurst 18 August 2019 (BBC News) – Mourners have gathered in Iceland to commemorate the loss of Okjokull, which has died at the age of about 700. The glacier was officially declared dead in 2014 when it was no longer thick enough to move. What once was glacier has been reduced to a […]

Linkages between Amundsen Sea winds and global SST and SLP. Time series of zonal wind and zonal total stress over the PITT box, the SOI and the IPO. The legend shows the unit for each time series, and scaling for the axis values where appropriate. Graphic: Holland, et al., 2019 / Nature Geoscience

August 15, 2019

First evidence of human-caused climate change melting the West Antarctic Ice Sheet

12 August 2019 (British Antarctic Survey) – A new study published this week reveals the first evidence of a direct link between human-induced global warming and melting of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. UK-US researchers say that curbing greenhouse gas emissions now could reduce the future sea-level contribution from this region. Ice loss in West […]

Landsat 8 images from 21 July 2018 (left) and 16 September 2018 (right) illustrating the Taku Glacier transient snowline. The 21 July 2018 snowline is at 975 m and the 16 September 2018 snowline is at 1400 m. Average end-of-summer snowline is 975 m; the 2018 end-of-summer snowline was the highest observed in the 73-year record. Graphic: AMS

August 13, 2019

State of the Climate in 2018: 2018 was the fourth-hottest year on record, behind 2016, 2015, and 2017

12 August 2019 (NCEI) – A new State of the Climate report [pdf] confirmed that 2018 was the fourth warmest year in records dating to the mid-1800s. Last year was the fourth warmest year on record despite La Niña conditions early in the year and the lack of a short-term warming El Niño influence until […]

August 10, 2019

Okjökull glacier remembered

By Kathryn Hansen 9 August 2019 (NASA) – On 18 August 2019, scientists will be among those who gather for a memorial atop Ok volcano in west-central Iceland. The deceased being remembered is Okjökull—a once-iconic glacier that has melted away throughout the 20th century and was declared dead in 2014. A geological map from 1901 estimated Okjökull […]

Land surface temperature over Europe, 25 July 2019, measured by the Copernicus Sentinel3 satellite. Graphic: ESA

August 2, 2019

WMO: July 2019 equaled or surpassed hottest month globally – World is on track for the 2015-2019 period “to be the five hottest years on record”

1 August 2019 (WMO) – According to the new data from the World Meteorological Organization and Copernicus Climate Change Programme, July 2019 at least equalled, if not surpassed, the hottest month in recorded history. This follows the warmest ever June on record. The data from the Copernicus Climate Change Programme, run by the European Centre […]

Daily sea ice conventration analysis for 27 July 2019. Graphic: NWS Alaska Sea Ice Program

July 30, 2019

Record-breaking European heat wave heads north, massive melting likely in Arctic – “This actually primes things for more sea ice loss later, on the order of weeks”

By Bob Henson 29 July 2019 (Weather Underground) – Over the next few days, meltwater will cascade across the Greenland Ice Sheet, and sea ice will dissolve into the Arctic Ocean in amounts that could be unprecedented for late July and early August. The same air mass that led to the sharpest, hottest heat wave ever […]

A woman walks past a window reflecting a thermometer showing a temperature of 41 degrees Celsius on 25 July 2019, in Paris, as a new heatwave hits the French capital. Photo: Dominique Faget / AFP / Getty Images

July 25, 2019

All-time heat records melt in Europe – Paris warmer than Singapore at 42.6°C (108.7°F) – National records broken on Wednesday fell again on Thursday – “‘If you’d have said five years ago we’d see temperature records fall this frequently, I wouldn’t have believed you”

By William Wilkes and Megan Durisin 24 July 2019 (Bloomberg) – Europe’s latest summer heatwave broke heat records just weeks after the continent had its hottest ever June, fueling concern that a shifting climate is triggering more extreme weather. Germany probably set a new all-time temperature record of 42.6 degrees Celsius (108.7 Fahrenheit) in the […]