Latest Ice calving Stories
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Alaska's Columbia Glacier, one of the fastest moving glaciers in the world, will cease to move by approximately 2020, according to a new study from the University of Colorado Boulder. The research team included members from CU-Boulder's Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, Department of Civil, Environmental, and Architectural Engineering, NASA and the Extreme Ice...
redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports - Your Universe Online Andreas Muenchow, associate professor of physical ocean science and engineering in University of Delaware’s College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment, reports the calving of an island two times the size of Manhattan on July 16, 2012, in his “Icy Seas” blog. Muenchow credits Trudy Wohleben of the Canadian Ice Service for first noticing the fracture. MODIS, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer aboard NASA’s Terra...
[ Watch the Video ] In October 2011, researchers flying in NASA’s Operation IceBridge campaign made the first-ever detailed, airborne measurements of a major iceberg calving event while it was in progress. Four months later, the IceBridge team has mapped the crack in Antarctica’s Pine Island Glacier in a way that allows glaciologists and the rest of us to fly through the icy canyon. The above image is a still frame captured from a three-dimensional, virtual flight through the new...
[ Watch the Video ] Breathtaking images taken from outer-space by NASA's Operation IceBridge -- the largest airborne survey of Earth's polar ice ever flown -- reveal a 19-mile long, 195 ft.-deep crack across a floating ice shelf in Antarctica that could produce the world’s largest iceberg. The rift was first discovered last October, but IceBridge scientists returned soon after to obtain the first-ever detailed airborne measurements of the 310 square mile iceberg calving in progress....
[ Watch the Video ] After discovering an emerging crack that cuts across the floating ice shelf of Pine Island Glacier in Antarctica, NASA's Operation IceBridge has flown a follow-up mission and made the first-ever detailed airborne measurements of a major iceberg calving in progress. NASA's Operation Ice Bridge, the largest airborne survey of Earth's polar ice ever flown, is in the midst of its third field campaign from Punta Arenas, Chile. The six-year mission will yield an...
A NASA scientist and her colleagues were able to observe for the first time the power of an earthquake and tsunami to break off large icebergs a hemisphere away.Kelly Brunt, a cryosphere specialist at Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., and colleagues were able to link the calving of icebergs from the Sulzberger Ice Shelf in Antarctica following the Tohoku Tsunami, which originated with an earthquake off the coast of Japan in March 2011. The finding, detailed in a paper published...
New detailed observations of what happens when glaciers float on ocean surfaceGlaciers that lose their footing on the seafloor and begin floating behave very erratically, according to a new study led by a Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego researcher.Floating glaciers produce larger icebergs than their grounded cousins and do so at unpredictable intervals, according to Scripps glaciologist Fabian Walter and colleagues in a paper to be published in the journal Geophysical...
Rate of ice-cap melt has been accelerating since 1985Close to 50 years of data show the Devon Island ice cap, one of the largest ice masses in the Canadian High Arctic, is thinning and shrinking.A paper published in the March edition of Arctic, the journal of the University of Calgary's Arctic Institute of North America, reports that between 1961 and 1985, the ice cap grew in some years and shrank in others, resulting in an overall loss of mass. But that changed 1985 when scientists began to...
U.S. scientists say they've created a computer program to help predict when icebergs will calve from ice sheets. The models we have do not currently have any way to figure out where the big ice sheets end and where the ice calves off to form icebergs, said Penn State Professor Richard Alley. The problem, he said, is the great variability involved in iceberg calving. One important variable -- the one that accounts for the largest portion of when the iceberg breaks -- is the rate at which ice...
Scientists have developed computer models that are useful in predicting how fast icebergs break off Antarctica and Greenland.Researchers hope the discovery will enable them to predict rising sea levels due to global warming caused by the burning of fossil fuels."To predict the future of the ice sheet and to understand the past, we have to put the information into a computer," says Richard B. Alley, the Evan Pugh professor of geosciences at Pennsylvania State University. "The...
