Methane release from beneath Greenland’s melting ice sheet rivals major world rivers

By Lauren C. Andrews2 January 2019 (Nature) – Sediments beneath glaciers and ice sheets harbour carbon reserves that, under certain conditions, can be converted to methane, a potent greenhouse gas. However, the formation and release of such methane is an unquantified component of the Arctic methane budget. Writing in Nature, Lamarche-Gagnon et al.1 present direct […]

Massive Canada glaciers shrinking rapidly – “We’ve never seen this. It’s outside the scope of normal.”

By Leyland Cecco 30 October 2018 TORONTO (The Guardian) – Scientists in Canada have warned that massive glaciers in the Yukon territory are shrinking even faster than would be expected from a warming climate – and bringing dramatic changes to the region. After a string of recent reports chronicling the demise of the ice fields, […]

Unprecedented ice loss in Russian ice cap – “We’ve never seen anything like this before, this study has raised as many questions as it has answered”

18 September 2018 (CIRES) – In the last few years, the Vavilov Ice Cap in the Russian High Arctic has dramatically accelerated, sliding as much as 82 feet a day in 2015, according to a new multi-national, multi-institute study led by CIRES Fellow Mike Willis, an assistant professor of Geology at CU Boulder. That dwarfs […]

Photo gallery: Winners of the Environmental Photographer of the Year award for 2018

24 September 2018 (Daily Mail) – The competition is run annually by the Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management. “Not in My Forest” by Calvin Ke, taken in Malaysia in 2018, received a Highly Commended award. He saw this southern pig-tailed macaque clutching a discarded bottle, examining and tasting it before sinking into this […]

Walking on Venezuela’s last glacier – “It’s a little bit like losing a species: once it’s gone, you never realize that it is missing”

By Kathryn Hansen 27 September 2018 (NASA) – The retreat of Humboldt Glacier—Venezuela’s last patch of perennial ice—means that the country could soon be glacier-free. We featured the glacier in August 2018 as an Image of the Day showing how it changed between 1988 and 2015.Satellite images can tell you a lot about a glacier, […]

Study highlights loss and damage in mountain cryosphere caused by global warming

By Andrew Angle 13 September 2018 (GlacierHub) – Few areas of the planet have been more affected by climate change than the mountain cryosphere, where negative impacts like glacier recession far exceed any positives like short-term increases in glacial runoff. These adverse changes make highland environments ideal for examining the policy concept of Loss and […]

Melting ice uncovers 1946 wreckage of U.S. plane in Swiss glacier

By Palko Karasz 16 August 2018 LONDON (The New York Times) – After an emergency landing on a Swiss glacier, the group of 12 Americans drank melted snow and survived on rations of one chocolate bar a person until daring pilots shuttled them to safety after five days marooned on the ice.Relics of that harrowing […]

2017 was one of three warmest years on record, international report confirms – Greenhouse gas concentrations, sea level reach all-time highs

2 August 2018 (NOAA) – It’s official: 2017 was the third-warmest year on record for the globe, trailing 2016 and 2015, according to the 28th annual State of the Climate report. The planet also experienced record-high greenhouse gas concentrations as well as rises in sea level. The annual checkup for the planet, led by scientists […]

The giant iceberg that broke from Antarctica’s Larsen C ice shelf is stuck, threatening to destabilize more of the continent’s ice

By Leah Rosenbaum 23 July 2018 (Science News) – Curl the fingers of your left hand over your palm and stick out your thumb like a hitchhiker. Now, you have a rough map of Antarctica — with the inside of your thumb playing the part of the Larsen C ice shelf, says glaciologist Ted Scambos […]

Global warming and the giant iceberg off Greenland’s shore – “This iceberg is the biggest we have seen”

By Carolyn Kormann 20 July 2018 (The New Yorker) – For a week, an iceberg as colossal as it is fragile held everyone in suspense. It arrived like a gargantuan beast that you hope won’t notice you, at the fishing village of Innaarsuit, Greenland, about five hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle. The iceberg […]

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