Latest Glacier Stories
Glaciologists who drilled through an ice cap perched precariously on the edge of a 16,000-foot-high Indonesian mountain ridge say that the ice field could vanish within in the next few years, another victim of global climate change.The Ohio State University researchers, supported by a National Science Foundation grant and the Freeport-McMoRan mining company and collaborating with Meteorological, Climatological and Geophysical Agency (BMKG) Indonesia and Columbia University, drilled three ice...
Envisat has been observing a rare event in the Arctic since early August - a giant iceberg breaking off the Petermann glacier in North-West Greenland.The Petermann glacier is one of the largest glaciers connecting the Greenland inland ice sheet with the Arctic Ocean. Upon reaching the sea, a number of these large outlet glaciers extend into the water with a floating 'ice tongue'.The ice tongue of the Petermann glacier was the largest in Greenland, with an extension of about 70 km until early...
A University of Delaware researcher reports that an "ice island" four times the size of Manhattan has calved from Greenland's Petermann Glacier. The last time the Arctic lost such a large chunk of ice was in 1962."In the early morning hours of August 5, 2010, an ice island four times the size of Manhattan was born in northern Greenland," said Andreas Muenchow, associate professor of physical ocean science and engineering at the University of Delaware's College of Earth, Ocean, and...
Boulders deposited by an ancient glacier that once covered the summit of Mauna Kea on the island of Hawaii have provided more evidence of the extraordinary power and reach of global change, particularly the slowdown of a North Atlantic Ocean current system that could happen again and continues to be a concern to climate scientists.A new study has found geochemical clues near the summit of Mauna Kea that tell a story of ancient glacier formation, the influence of the most recent ice age,...
Antarctica may not be the world's largest landmass -- it's the fifth-largest continent -- but resting on top of that land is the world's largest ice sheet. That ice holds more than 60 percent of Earth's fresh water and carries the potential to significantly raise sea level. The continent is losing ice to the sea, and scientists want to know how much.Antarctica's ice generally flows from the middle of the continent toward the edge, dipping toward the sea before lifting back up and floating....
New photos taken from the same spot that British climber George Mallory captured on camera in 1921 show significant ice loss.The Asia Society (AS) arranged for the pictures to be taken. "The photographs reveal a startling truth: the ice of the Himalaya is disappearing," according to an AS statement."They reveal an alarming loss in ice mass over an 89-year period."The photos taken by Mallory reveal a powerful, white, S-shaped sweep of ice on the mountain. Mountaineer David...
NASA-funded researchers monitoring Greenland's Jakobshavn Isbrae glacier report that a 7 square kilometer (2.7 square mile) section of the glacier broke up on July 6 and 7. The calving front "“ where the ice sheet meets the ocean "“ retreated nearly 1.5 kilometers (a mile) in one day and is now further inland than at any time previously observed. The chunk of lost ice is roughly one-eighth the size of Manhattan Island, New York.Research teams led by Ian Howat of the Byrd Polar Research...
American glaciologist Lonnie Thompson has spent decades on glaciers drilling ice cores and has never come across a situation that is now occurring on top of Puncak Jaya -- a three-mile high glacier located in the Sudirman Range in the western central highlands of Papua province, Indonesia. Thompson had hoped to chronicle the affect of global warming on the last remaining glacier in the Pacific. But what he found has worried him even more. As he set up camp he could hear the ice melting...
To the untrained eye, University of Colorado at Boulder Research Associate Craig Lee's recent discovery of a 10,000-year-old wooden hunting weapon might look like a small branch that blew off a tree in a windstorm.Nothing could be further from the truth, according to Lee, a research associate with CU-Boulder's Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research who found the atlatl dart, a spear-like hunting weapon, melting out of an ice patch high in the Rocky Mountains close to Yellowstone National...
Planetary scientists have uncovered telltale signs of water on Mars "” frozen and liquid "” in the earliest period of the Red Planet's history. A new claim, made public this month, is that a deep ocean covered some of the northern latitudes.But the evidence for water grows much more scant after the Noachian era, which ended 3.5 billion years ago. Now Brown University planetary geologists have documented running water that sprang from glaciers throughout the Martian middle latitudes as...
Latest Glacier Reference Libraries
Glacier National Park is located in the American state of Montana, south of the Canadian borders of British Columbia and Alberta. The park contains one million acres of varying landscape with a wide range of plant and animal life. It holds two mountain ranges, over 130 discovered and named lakes, and 16,000 square miles of protected unspoiled ecosystem known as the Crown of the Continent Ecosystem. The history of human presence in the Glacier National Park area is thought to begin about...
Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve is located in the Alaska panhandle, west of the city of Juneau. The establishment of the park first began in 1925, when Calvin Coolidge signed the bill that would make the Glacier Bay area a national monument. After an expansion occurred in 1978 by President Jimmy Carter, the park increased in size by 523,000 acres under the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA). This act helped expand the park again in 1980, while it was in the...
