By Kathryn Hansen 19 December 2017 (NASA) – In September 2017, a new iceberg calved from Pine Island Glacier—one of the main outlets where the West Antarctic Ice Sheet flows into the ocean. Just weeks later, the berg named B-44 shattered into more than 20 fragments.On 15 December 2017, the Operational Land Imager (OLI) on […]
By Carol Rasmussen 1 November 2017(NASA) – New maps of Greenland’s coastal seafloor and bedrock beneath its massive ice sheet show that two to four times as many coastal glaciers are at risk of accelerated melting as previously thought.Researchers at the University of California at Irvine (UCI), NASA and 30 other institutions havepublished the most […]
By Chris Mooney 15 November 2017 (The Washington Post) – New York City has plenty to worry about from sea level rise. But according to a new study by NASA researchers, it should worry specifically about two major glacier systems in Greenland’s northeast and northwest — but not so much about other parts of the […]
10 October 2017 (PIK) – While burning coal today causes Earth to overheat, about 300 million years ago the formation of that same coal brought our planet close to global glaciation. For the first time, scientists show the massive effect in a study published in the renowned Proceedings of the US Academy of Sciences. When […]
By Carol Rasmussen 19 September 2017(Jet Propulsion Laboratory) – A NASA study has located the Antarctic glaciers that accelerated the fastest between 2008 and 2014 and finds that the most likely cause of their speedup is an observed influx of warm water into the bay where they’re located.The water was only 1 to 2 degrees […]
8 October 2017 (The Guardian) – A short film shot by Heath Patterson captures photographer Vaughan Brookfield and Tom Lynch’s journey to a New Zealand glacier equipped with hundreds of kilograms of gear and a light projector. Their plan was to project images on to the rapidly receding Tasman Glacier. Brookfield says: “We want to […]
By Alan Burdick 21 September 2017 (The New Yorker) – Every spring, in alpine regions around the world, one of Earth’s tiniest migrations takes place. The migrants are single-celled green algae; they are kin to seaweed, but instead of living in the sea they live in snow. (Snow weed, maybe?) They spend the winter deep […]
By Erik Ortiz 27 September 2017 (NBC News) – After breaking free from Antarctica this summer, a giant iceberg roughly the size of Delaware is moving on to open waters. New satellite images from TerraSAR-X show the iceberg known as A68 has begun to drift away from the Larsen C ice shelf and is being […]
By Sune Engel Rasmussen 28 August 2017 SHAH FOLADI, Afghanistan (The Guardian) – The central highlands of Afghanistan are a world away from the congested chaos of the country’s cities. Hills roll across colossal, uninhabited spaces fringed by snow-flecked mountains, set against blistering blue skies. In this spectacular, harsh landscape, one can pinpoint more or […]
By Ben Walker 25 August 2017 SANTIAGO K, Bolivia (InsideClimate News) – Someone’s nearly always lived in Santiago K. Cupped in the Bolivian highlands that border Chile, the small village is littered by centuries of conquest and expansion: from the pre-Incas, who ringed the surrounding hills with protective fortresses, to the gold-hungry Spanish conquistadors drawn […]