By Christine Dell’Amore29 November 2012 (National Geographic News) – The polar ice sheets are indeed shrinking—and fast, according to a comprehensive new study on climate change. And the effects, according to an international team, are equally clear—sea levels are rising faster than predicted, which could bring about disastrous effects for people and wildlife. Rising seas […]
Media Inquiries: 202.473.7660, media@worldbank.org18 November 2012 (World Bank) – Like summer’s satellite image of the melting Greenland ice sheet, a new report suggests time may be running out to temper the rising risks of climate change. Turn Down the Heat: Why a 4°C Warmer World Must be Avoided, [pdf, eBook] warns we’re on track for […]
By Becky Oskin, OurAmazingPlanet Staff Writer23 October 2012 (LiveScience.com) – The relatively small glaciers that drape the planet’s mountains will play an important role in future sea level rise, according to a new study that estimated glaciers’ collective size. Researchers calculated the ice thickness for 171,000 glaciers worldwide, excluding the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, which […]
Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy [Desdemona finds it very hard to watch the last of Earth’s charismatic megafauna suffer as they become extinct.] By Miguel Llanos, NBC News13 September 2012 Wildlife biologist Ian Bullock is a seasoned visitor to the Arctic, but even he was surprised by what […]
Caption by Michon Scott28 August 2012 On 26 August 2012, the extent of Arctic water covered by sea ice fell below 4.17 million square kilometers (1.61 million square miles), the record minimum set in 2007. Arctic sea ice stood at 4.10 million square kilometers (1.58 million square miles), the National Snow and Ice Data Center […]
By Maria-José Viñas, NASA Earth Science News Team 9 August 2012 An unusually strong storm formed off the coast of Alaska on August 5 and tracked into the center of the Arctic Ocean, where it slowly dissipated over the next several days. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured this natural-color […]
By Marco Tedesco15 August 2012 Melting in Greenland set a new record before the end of the melting season. Over the past days, the cumulative melting index over the entire Greenland ice sheet (defined as the number of days when melting occurs times the area subject to melting) on August 8th exceeded the record value […]
By David Biello, Scientific American27 July 2012 Remember when climate change contrarians professed outrage over a few errors in the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s last report? One of their favorite such mistakes involved an overestimation of the pace at which glaciers would melt at the “Third Pole,” where the Indian subcontinent crashes into […]
By Suzanne Goldenberg, US environment correspondent, www.guardian.co.uk25 July 2012 The gust of warm air that caused the unprecedented thaw in Greenland’s surface ice also appears to have caused unusually high runoff from a glacier, wiping out a crossing near a key research and transport hub. Scientists who fly in Kangerlussuaq, near the western edge of […]
By Suzanne Goldenberg, US environment correspondent, www.guardian.co.uk24 July 2012 The Greenland ice sheet melted at a faster rate this month than at any other time in recorded history, with virtually the entire ice sheet showing signs of thaw. The rapid melting over just four days was captured by three satellites. It has stunned and alarmed […]