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 […]

Video: 10 billion tons of ice fall into the ocean as Greenland iceberg calves – “Global sea-level rise is both undeniable and consequential”

9 July 2018 (NYU) – A team of scientists has captured on video a four-mile iceberg breaking away from a glacier in eastern Greenland, an event that points to one of the forces behind global sea-level rise. The resulting iceberg, broken off from Greenland’s Helheim Glacier, would stretch from lower Manhattan up to Midtown in […]

Graph of the Day: Increase of airborne black carbon density in India from 2005 to 2016

By Kathryn Hansen 28 June 2018 (NASA) – In recent decades, northern India has been plagued by a double-dose of air pollution due to nearby sources of desert dust and increasing amounts of airborne particles from human activities. New research suggests that winds are spreading the problem, moving some of the pollution southward in ever-increasing […]

Study finds hundreds of thousands of U.S. homes at risk of chronic flooding due to sea level rise over the coming decades – “By 2100, there’s a 98–100 percent chance that we get 6 inches of sea level rise. It’s virtually guaranteed.”

(UCS) – Sea levels are rising. Tides are inching higher. High-tide floods are becoming more frequent and reaching farther inland. And hundreds of US coastal communities will soon face chronic, disruptive flooding that directly affects people’s homes, lives, and properties. Yet property values in most coastal real estate markets do not currently reflect this risk. […]

Warmer ocean water destabilizing Antarctica ice shelves from below also causing massive vertical cracks – “There are dual processes going on here: One that is destabilizing from below, and another from above.”

13 June 2018 (University of Waterloo) – A new study from the University of Waterloo discovered that rising sea levels could be accelerated by vulnerable ice shelves in the Antarctic. The study, by an international team of polar scientists led by Canada Research Chair Christine Dow of Waterloo’s Faculty of Environment, discovered that the process […]

Antarctica ice melt increased by more than five times since 1997-2002 period – “The detailed record shows an acceleration, starting around 2002”

By Chris Mooney 13 June 2018 (The Washington Post) – Antarctica’s ice sheet is melting at a rapidly increasing rate, now pouring more than 200 billion tons of ice into the ocean annually and raising sea levels a half-millimeter every year, a team of 80 scientists reported Wednesday. The melt rate has tripled in the […]

Antarctica ice-sheet melt increased sharply in 2012 – “The continent is causing sea levels to rise faster today than at any time in the past 25 years”

13 June 2018 (University of Leeds) – Ice losses from Antarctica have increased global sea levels by 7.6 mm since 1992, with two fifths of this rise (3 mm) coming in the last five years alone.The findings are from a major climate assessment known as the Ice Sheet Mass Balance Inter-comparison Exercise (IMBIE), and are […]

New Antarctic process contributing to sea-level rise and climate change revealed, that “may trigger a transition from a cold regime to a warm regime, characterised by high rates of melting from the base of ice shelves”

24 April 2018 (University of Tasmania) – A new Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies (IMAS)-led study has revealed a previously undocumented process where melting glacial ice sheets change the ocean in a way that further accelerates the rate of ice melt and sea level rise.Led by IMAS PhD student Alessandro Silvano and published in […]

Glacier loss is accelerating because of global warming

By John Abraham 18 April 2018 (The Guardian) – With global warming, we can make predictions and then take measurements to test those predictions. One prediction (a pretty obvious one) is that a warmer world will have less snow and ice. In particular, areas that have year-round ice and snow will start to melt. Alpine […]

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