Category: Water_MI_CN

The glaciers—one of which, the Thwaites, has been called the “doomsday glacier” by climate scientists because of its potential to raise sea levels—are positioned in a way that allows increasingly warm ocean water to flow beneath them and erode the ice sheet from the base, causing “runaway ice loss,” the University of Maine team said in a statement.

Jason Box waited for the skies to clear. The climatologist’s team was already in southern Greenland to begin their research project, but he was stuck in Nuuk, the country’s capital, because weather delayed his travels. Dark clouds loomed overhead, while the patter of rain echoed loudly as it fell onto the ocean.

A new discovery deep beneath one of Antarctica’s rivers of ice could change scientists’ understanding of how the ice flows, with important implications for estimating future sea level rise.

All scientist Erin Pettit could see when she looked at the satellite photos of the ice shelf in front of the Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica was the giant crack that stretched across most of the image.

Arctic sea ice appeared to have hit its annual maximum extent on Feb. 25 after growing through the fall and winter. This year’s wintertime extent is the 10th-lowest in the satellite record maintained by the National Snow and Ice Data Center, one of NASA’s Distributed Active Archive Centers.

On a brutally cold day here earlier this week, Kirill Shchapov stood 200 meters off the shore of Lake Michigan, using a green auger to drill into a glistening ice sheet that stretched to the horizon. A fountain of water erupted when he yanked the auger from the hole. But soon Shchapov, a limnologist at the University of Minnesota (UM), Duluth, and other researchers were busily lowering nets and instruments through the opening, collecting water samples and shellfish that lived on the lake floor some 5 meters down.

The number of places on Earth with the right combination of natural climate and geography for the Olympic Winter Games is already inherently limited. But as global temperatures rise from the burning of fossil fuels, the list is narrowing further. Factoring in the specific conditions that world-class skiers and snowboarders need to safely land tricks and have fair downhill races means very few past host cities will be able to reliably hold the games again by century’s end, a new study finds.

Warm conditions in January, including a scorching heat wave with temperatures exceeding 100 degrees Fahrenheit in some locations, melted almost all snow cover on some of Chile’s Olivares Glaciers and Volcan Overo in Argentina. With around eight weeks left in the melt season, the exposed glacial ice could disappear faster now without a blanket of snow.

Perhaps you remember iceberg A68a, which enjoyed a few minutes of fame back in 2017 when it broke off an ice shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula. Hardly your everyday iceberg, it was one of the biggest ever seen, more than 100 miles long and 30 miles wide.

Winter is the fastest warming season for most of the U.S. Warmer air holds more moisture, which can fall as snow when temperatures are below freezing.
Between 1970-2019, snowfall decreased in the spring and fall for most of the U.S. Winter showed a mixed record with more snowfall in some cold northern regions.