glaciers

John Gully, On the Great Godley Glacier , watercolour. Lakes and sediment now exist in these valleys where glaciers used to flow. Credit: Alexander Turnbull Library, CC BY-SA As the austral summer draws to a close, we are preparing to fly over the Southern Alps to survey glaciers. This annual flight supports the longest scientific study of Aotearoa New Zealand's icescapes—and it shows that all of our glaciers have retreated…

The Current10:20The case for a ‘leap minute’The leap year is the most famous of the leap family, keeping our calendars right every year, while behind the scenes, with little fanfare, the leap second has been doing its part. But global stakeholders believe it's time for a change — the leap minute."Ever since we've invented clocks, we've been having to make sure that they are keeping us relative to the sky," Rob Cockcroft, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ont., told host…

The majority of Svalbard's marine-terminating glaciers are retreating, with a couple of exceptions. Credit: Dr. Tian Li On February 20, a dedicated team of researchers presented a new high-resolution calving front dataset from 149 glaciers in Svalbard, spanning from 1985 to 2023. This innovative dataset, featured in Earth System Science Data, offers an important tool to understand better the mechanisms behind glacier calving,…

Superstorms, abrupt climate shifts and New York City frozen in ice. That's how the blockbuster Hollywood movie "The Day After Tomorrow" depicted an abrupt shutdown of the Atlantic Ocean's circulation and the catastrophic consequences. While Hollywood's vision was over the top, the 2004 movie raised a serious question: If global warming shuts down the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, which is crucial for carrying heat from…

In a mocking fluke of physics, Greenland – one of the main sources of meltwater flooding Earth's shores – is actually rising faster than the rising oceans.The elevating bedrock is gradually birthing new land in Greenland's sea including small islands and skerries, like Uunartoq Qeqertaq. Translating as 'warming island', this new 13 kilometer (8 mile) long landmass off the east coast of Greenland was officially recognized and added to Greenland's maps in 2005."The land uplift we observe in Greenland these years cannot be…

NASA's newest climate satellite rocketed into orbit Thursday to survey the world's oceans and atmosphere in never-before-seen detail.SpaceX launched the Pace satellite on its $948-million US mission before dawn from Cape Canaveral, Fla., with the Falcon rocket heading south over the Atlantic Ocean to achieve a rare polar orbit.The satellite will spend at least three years studying the oceans from 676 kilometres up, as well as the atmosphere. It will scan the globe daily with two of the science instruments. A third…

Ancient creatures are emerging from the cold storage of melting permafrost, almost like something out of a horror movie.From incredibly preserved extinct megafauna like the woolly rhino, to the 40,000-year-old remains of a giant wolf, and bacteria over 750,000 years old.Not all of these things are dead.Centuries-old moss was able to spring back to life in the warmth of the laboratory. So too, incredibly, were tiny 42,000-year-old roundworms.These fascinating glimpses of organisms from Earth's long distant past are…

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain The world experienced an unprecedented heat wave in 2022, and this long duration and extreme heat wave event aroused widespread concern. Heat wave events have a huge impact on the global melting of glaciers. Urumqi Glacier No. 1 is the only one in China with more than 30 years of continuous glaciological mass balance…

A new report by the U.S. branch of the non-profit Environmental Investigation Agency says that investment interest and government tax incentives are fuelling intense mining exploration in remote northern B.C. — raising concerns about the environmental impacts of the work and its financial implications.The report focuses on the transboundary region, which falls along the border between the Alaska panhandle and the province of B.C. Much of this exploration is focused on the so-called Golden Triangle, which in many areas is…

The Aletsch glacier in 2009, in Switzerland. Credit: UNIL—Guillaume Jouvet Even if global warming were to stop completely, the volume of ice in the European Alps would fall by 34% by 2050. If the trend observed over the last 20 years continues at the same rate, however, almost half the volume of ice will be lost as has been demonstrated by scientists from the University of Lausanne (UNIL, Switzerland) in a new international…