Ancient Geodynamics Indicate Earth’s Ice Sheets More Stable Than Thought
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online For decades, researchers have used ancient shorelines to predict the stability of today’s largest ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica. High shoreline markings from three million years...
Latest Glaciology Stories
Alaska’s melting glaciers remain one of the largest contributors to the world’s rising sea levels, say two University of Alaska Fairbanks geophysicists. UAF Geophysical Institute researchers Anthony Arendt and Regine Hock joined 14 scientists from 10 countries who combined data from field measurements and satellites to get the most complete global picture to date of glacier mass losses and their contribution to rising sea levels. “Sea level change is a pressing societal...
WASHINGTON, May 16, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- A new study of glaciers worldwide using observations from two NASA satellites has helped resolve differences in estimates of how fast glaciers are disappearing and contributing to sea level rise. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO) The new research found glaciers outside of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, repositories of 1 percent of all land ice, lost an average of 571 trillion pounds (259...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online Our world is shrinking, or at least the icy parts of it are. And new studies only pile on to the growing evidence of how climate change is altering the shape of this planet. Scientists presented findings at the Meeting of the Americas in Cancún, Mexico about how the snow and ice covering Mount Everest is retreating. Glaciers on the mountain have shrunk by 13 percent in the last 50 years and the snow line has shifted upward by 590...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online An international team of scientists, led by Julie Brigham-Grette of the University of Amherst, has analyzed the longest continental sediment core ever collected in the Arctic to provide “absolutely new knowledge” of Arctic climate from 2.2 million to 3.6 million years ago. "While existing geologic records from the Arctic contain important hints about this time period, what we are presenting is the most continuous archive of...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Climate change impacts on the surface of the Greenland Ice Sheet have been widely studied. An understanding, however, of the key processes in iceberg production has eluded researchers for a long time. A new study, led by the Universite Libre de Bruxelles, presents a sophisticated computer model that provides fresh insight into the impact of climate change on the production of icebergs by Greenland glaciers. The model also demonstrates...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online NASA said its Operation IceBridge team has finished up another successful campaign to continue collecting data of Arctic ice measurements. IceBridge was started in 2009 to help continue and expand a dataset started by NASA's Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) in 2003. During this year's campaign, the team measured sea ice, mapped sub-ice bedrock and gathered data on Greenland's glaciers by flying science missions out of...
1000-year Antarctic Peninsula climate reconstruction A new 1000-year Antarctic Peninsula climate reconstruction shows that summer ice melting has intensified almost ten-fold, and mostly since the mid 20th Century. Summer ice melt affects the stability of Antarctic ice shelves and glaciers. The research, published this week in the journal Nature Geoscience, adds new knowledge to the international effort that is required to understand the causes of environmental change in Antarctica and...
Brett Smith for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online As the debate over climate change continues, so does the publication of studies that support or challenge the notion that human activity is the main driver of rising temperatures. According to a new study in Nature Geoscience, the dramatic thinning of glaciers in Western Antarctica is due to natural variation, and cannot be attributed directly to carbon emissions. "If we could look back at this region of Antarctica in the 1940s...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online The question of ice-free summers in the Arctic, for most scientists, is not "if," but "when." A new study by two National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) scientists says that "when" is coming sooner than many thought. Already, the Arctic has experienced a loss of thick, multi-year ice, with last September’s extent being less than half the average of 1979-2000. The scientists, James Overland of NOAA’s Pacific...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online "Go with the flow" has been a standard, if somewhat glib, piece of nearly universally applicable advice for a long time – and never more so than now. Shujie Wang, a geography doctoral student at the University of Cincinnati's McMicken College of Arts & Sciences, recently led a team of researchers who discovered that the best way to monitor the environmental health of the Antarctic is just to go with the flow. The ice flow, that...
Latest Glaciology Reference Libraries
The Columbia Plateau ecoregion is a Level III ecoregion designed by the United States Environmental Protection Agency in the U.S. states of Oregon and Washington, with little areas over the Washington state border in Idaho. This ecoregion stretches across a wide swath of the Columbia River Basin from the Dalles, Oregon to Lewiston, Idaho to Okanogan, Washington near the Canadian border. It incorporates nearly 500 miles of the Columbia River, as well as the lower reaches of major tributaries....
The Arctic Ocean which is located in the Northern Hemisphere and mostly in the Arctic north polar region, is the shallowest and smallest of the world’s five major oceanic divisions. The International Hydrographic Organization recognizes it as an ocean, although, some oceanographers consider it as the Arctic Mediterranean Sea or simply, the Arctic Sea, classifying it a Mediterranean sea or an estuary of the Atlantic Ocean. Alternatively, the Arctic Ocean can be considered as the northernmost...
Meltwater is water that is released from melting snow or ice. This includes meltwater from glacial ice and ice shelves over oceans. Meltwater is often produced during volcanic eruptions, and can cause dangerous lahars (landslides of wet volcanic debris). When meltwater pools on the surface rather than draining or flowing away, it forms pools known as melt ponds. Meltwater will often refreeze as the temperature drops. Meltwater can also collect or melt under the ice's surface. Sub-glacial...
