Before you do anything else, the EPA presents, very effectively, the issues here

Melting Ice & Snow

MELTING ICE & SNOW

Melting glaciers and ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica have a direct and profound impact on sea-level rise.

Greenland’s ice sheet is losing mass about six times faster than it was a few decades ago. In the past fifty years, the sheet has already shed enough to add about half an inch of water to the world’s oceans. In just this last summer’s heat wave, meltwater — equivalent to over 4 million swimming pools — sloughed into the ocean in a single day.

Antarctica, that frigid expanse of land at the Earth’s Southern pole, is covered by 90% of the planet’s ice. If all of its ice were to melt, sea levels would rise by 190 feet. It is melting at an alarming rate, with the rate of thaw tripling over the past decade and losing 2.71 trillion tons of ice between 1992 and 2017 with half of these losses occurring in the past five years, shrinking to record low levels

Melting ice is not limited to the poles and is happening around the world: Alaska’s sea ice has all melted; the glaciers of the Himalayas are melting twice as fast as they were in 2000; the Patagonian icefields are a fraction of their previous size. Iceland marked its first loss of a glacier to climate change with a funeral, and the Swiss followed suit with a funeral for the Pizol glacier in the Alps. 

And, then there is our own ice melt.

Diana Six, an entomologist at the U. of Montana, recently returned from a trip to Montana’s Glacial National Park, where the 97/98˚heat had decimated the ice. In despair, she said, “I don’t think people realize that climate change is not just a loss of ice. It’s all the stuff that’s dependent on it. The water is too warm for the fish. At some of the lower elevations, glacier lilies were shriveled, lupins didn’t even open. The flowers should extend for another three weeks but they’re already gone. Any insects or birds that depend upon them, like bees or hummingbirds are in trouble, their food is gone. Bird populations have just baked. There have been total losses of a lot of baby birds this year. You see these ospreys and eagles sitting on top of the trees in their nests and those young, they just can’t take the heat.”

CURRENT NEWS

The off-the-charts rise of global sea surface temperature this spring has been eye-popping

By David Wallace-Wells 06/01/23
There are a lot of unsettling signals coming from the world’s oceans right now. Even for those of us who watch things like temperature anomalies and extreme weather events as likely portents of the climate…
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Slowing ocean current caused by melting Antarctic ice could have drastic climate impact, study says

By Donna Lu 05/25/23
A major global deep ocean current has slowed down by approximately 30% since the 1990s as a result of melting Antarctic ice, which could have critical consequences for Earth’s climate patterns and sea levels, new…
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U.S. Military Sees Growing Threat in Thawing Permafrost

By Daniel Cusick 05/24/23
Fox, Alaska, is a tiny town, but on Monday it hosted one of the Pentagon’s senior officials for a unique tour. Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks was there to see 360-foot-long tunnel that military engineers…
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A Greenland glacier’s rapid melting may signal faster sea level rise

By Chris Mooney 05/08/23
Scientists studying one of Greenland’s largest glaciers say it is melting far faster than expected in its most vulnerable region, a worrying sign that glaciers perched in the ocean could contribute to sea level rise…
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Snow melt, predicted flooding to close Yosemite National Park for at least 5 days

By Dan Stillman 04/26/23
Spring is the “perfect season” to see waterfalls as warmer weather melts winter snow, according to the Yosemite National Park website. This year, however, the threat of flooding from that same melting snow will close…
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A Heat Shield for the Most Important Ice on Earth

By Rachel Riederer 04/25/23
On a clear morning in late March, in rural Lake Elmo, Minnesota, I followed two materials scientists, Tony Manzara and Doug Johnson, as they tromped down a wintry hill behind Manzara’s house. The temperature was…
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Truly ‘Uncharted Territory.’

By Bill McKibben 04/02/23
Sadly, Trump's arrest was not the biggest news story of the week. Last Thursday’s big news story was the indictment of Donald Trump, with banner headlines in all the papers that still print on paper.…
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CNN

Antarctic ice melt poses grave risk to ocean circulation, new study finds

04/01/23
Michael Holmes interviews Matthew England, one of the scientists behind a new study showing that melting Antarctic ice poses a grave risk for the global climate.
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Melting Antarctic ice predicted to cause rapid slowdown of deep ocean current by 2050

By Graham Readfearn 03/29/23
Melting ice around Antarctica will cause a rapid slowdown of a major global deep ocean current by 2050 that could alter the world’s climate for centuries and accelerate sea level rise, according to scientists behind…
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Abyssal ocean overturning slowdown and warming driven by Antarctic meltwater

By Qian Li, Matthew H. England and Others 03/29/23
The abyssal ocean circulation is a key component of the global meridional overturning circulation, cycling heat, carbon, oxygen and nutrients throughout the world ocean. The strongest historical trend observed in the abyssal ocean is warming…
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Many Antarctic glaciers are never snow-free. See how remarkably different this year is.

By Kasha Patel and Naema Ahmed 03/24/23
Warmer-than-average temperatures across the continent’s northernmost tip began creeping in during November, lasting through February. By then, several glaciers were nearly or completely free of snow....
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As snow records fall along the eastern Sierra Nevada, fears loom over impending snowmelt

By Louis Sahagun 03/11/23
Snow began falling early and hard this season at the Mammoth Mountain ski resort, and the record-breaking amounts don’t look like they’ll stop anytime soon.
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KEY RESOURCES

Ice Sheets

01/29/22
The Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are losing significant amounts of land-based ice as a result of human-caused global warming. Data from NASA's GRACE and GRACE Follow-On satellites show that the land ice sheets in…

Five Facts to Help You Understand Sea Ice

10/20/21
One way that scientists monitor climate change is through the measure of sea ice extent. Sea ice extent is the area of ice that covers the Arctic Ocean at a given time. Sea ice plays…
epa

Climate Change Indicators: Snow and Ice

05/18/21
The Earth’s surface contains many forms of snow and ice, including sea, lake, and river ice; snow cover; glaciers, ice caps, and ice sheets; and frozen ground. Climate change can dramatically alter the Earth’s snow-…

New Study Identifies Mountain Snowpack Most “At-Risk” from Climate Change

03/01/21
CPO-funded scientists theorize why snowpack in coastal regions, the Arctic, and the Western U.S. may be among the most at-risk for premature melt from rising temperatures

Polar Tales: The Future of Ice, Life, and the Arctic (2020)

02/24/21
The Arctic is the ground zero of climate change, and the polar bear is on the front line. Filled with groundbreaking photography that reveals the breathtaking landscapes of the Arctic and the transformations of the…

Antarctica: The Waking Giant (2020)

02/24/21
Winner of three 2020 International Photography Awards and named Photographer of the Year from the Tokyo International Awards, explorer Sebastian Copeland's stunning photography delivers unparalleled access to the least explored continent on Earth and galvanizes…

Rate of mass loss from the Greenland Ice Sheet will exceed Holocene values this century

10/08/20
The Greenland Ice Sheet (GIS) is losing mass at a high rate1. Given the short-term nature of the observational record, it is difficult to assess the historical importance of this mass-loss trend.

Widespread Biological Response to Rapid Warming on the Antarctic Peninsula

10/01/20
First Peninsula-wide assessment of biological sensitivity to recent warming.

The Ice at the End of the World (2019)

03/28/20
A riveting, urgent account of the explorers and scientists racing to understand the rapidly melting ice sheet in Greenland, a dramatic harbinger of climate change.

Operation IceBridge mission

09/10/19
NASA’s Operation IceBridge images Earth's polar ice in unprecedented detail to better understand processes that connect the polar regions with the global climate system.

MORE NEWS

As glaciers melt, sudden flood risks threaten 15 million people, study finds

By Kasha Patel   02/07/23  
The Shishpar glacier in northern Pakistan started rapidly thawing during a record heat wave last spring. The melted snow and ice flowed into a nearby ice-dammed lake until water levels grew too high, triggering a…
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CNN

An ‘inland tsunami’: 15 million people are at risk from catastrophic glacial lake outbursts, researchers find

By Rachel Ramirez   02/07/23  
Glaciers around the world are melting at an alarming rate, and are leaving massive pools of water in their wake. The meltwater fills the depression left behind by the glacier, forming what’s known as a…
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Half of glaciers will be gone by 2100 even under Paris 1.5C accord, study finds

By Phoebe Weston   01/05/23  
If global heating continues at current rate of 2.7C, losses will be greater with 68% of glaciers disappearingHalf the planet’s glaciers will have melted by 2100 even if humanity sticks to goals set out in…
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‘Zombie’ viruses are thawing in melting permafrost because of climate change

By Michael Birnbaum and Ellen Francis   12/02/22  
The thawing of the permafrost due to climate change may expose a vast store of ancient viruses, according to a team of European researchers, who say they have found 13 previously unknown pathogens that had…
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Where Walruses Go When Sea Ice Is Gone

By Carolyn Kormann   11/21/22  
n 2018, in the Siberian Arctic, the filmmakers Evgenia Arbugaeva and Maxim Arbugaev, who are sister and brother, arrived on a strange beach. “The sand was of dark colour, full of bones, and smelled terrible,”…
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Glaciers in Yosemite and Africa will disappear by 2050, U.N. warns

By Rick Noack   11/03/22  
Glaciers in at least one-third of World Heritage sites possessing them, including Yosemite National Park, will disappear by mid-century even if emissions are curbed, the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization warned in a new…
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Glacier and Ice Sheet Melt

11/01/22  
The melting of ice sheets and glaciers around the world is accelerating and contributing to rising sea levels. Melting in Greenland is particularly dramatic, with the record year of 2012 witnessing surface melt far in…
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Thawing Permafrost Exposes Old Pathogens—and New Hosts

By Grace Browne   10/27/22  
The Arctic—that Remote, largely undisturbed, 5.5 million square miles of frozen terrain—is heating up fast. In fact, it’s warming nearly four times quicker than the rest of the world, with disastrous consequences for the region…
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Melting sea ice is acidifying the Arctic Ocean

By Laura Baisas   09/29/22  
Climate change is changing the chemistry of the Earth’s oceans. The heat from increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is melting critical sea ice and causing ocean acidification, or a reduction in the pH of…
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What Antarctica’s Disintegration Asks of Us

By Elizabeth Rush   09/08/22  
On our first morning at the Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica, the air was eerily still. The captain of our research icebreaker, encouraged by the calm, made a bold choice: Our ship would hold close…
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Greenland ice sheet set to raise sea levels by nearly a foot

By Chris Mooney   08/29/22  
New research suggests the massive ice sheet is already set to lose more than 3 percent of its mass, even if the world stopped emitting greenhouse gases today.
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New Research Forecasts More Dire Sea Level Rise as Greenland’s Ice Melts

By Elena Shao   08/29/22  
The melting of the Greenland ice sheet could eventually raise global sea levels by at least 10 inches even if humans immediately stop burning the fossil fuels that are warming the planet to dangerous levels,…
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WWF

Six ways loss of Arctic ice impacts everyone

08/15/22  
Polar ice caps are melting as global warming causes climate change. We lose Arctic sea ice at a rate of almost 13% per decade, and over the past 30 years, the oldest and thickest ice…
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Climate change’s impact intensifies as U.S. prepares to take action

By Chris Mooney and Others   08/11/22  
For residents of the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, the United States’ recent success in clinching a major piece of climate change legislation may feel like too little, too late. Over the past 40 years, as…
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Coastal glacier retreat linked to climate change

08/01/22  
More of the world's coastal glaciers are melting faster than ever, but exactly what's triggering the large-scale retreat has been difficult to pin down because of natural fluctuations in the glaciers' surroundings. Now, researchers at…
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Greenland Lost a ‘Not Normal’ Amount Of Ice Last Weekend

By Nexus Media   07/21/22  
So much ice melted in northern Greenland last weekend that the newly melted water could cover the entire state of West Virginia with one foot of water. Yes, you read that correctly. Even given the…
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‘Unknown Territory’: Antarctic Glaciers Melting at Rate Unprecedented in 5,500 Years: Study

By Julia Conley   06/10/22  
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…
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How humid air, intensified by climate change, is melting Greenland ice

By Kasha Patel   06/02/22  
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.…
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Scientists in Antarctica discover a vast, salty groundwater system under the ice sheet – with implications for sea level rise

By Matthew Siegfries & Others   05/05/22  
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.
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Antarctic ice shelves are shattering. How fast will seas rise?

By Alejandra Borunda   03/29/22  
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…
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NASA Finds 2022 Arctic Winter Sea Ice 10th-Lowest on Record

By Roberto Molar Candanosa   03/22/22  
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…
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On the Great Lakes, scientists are making a ‘Winter Grab’ of rare data

By Susan Cosier   02/18/22  
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…
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Winter Olympic Sites Are Melting Away because of Climate Crisis

By Andrea Thompson   02/16/22  
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,…
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Mountain glaciers may have less ice than estimated, straining freshwater supply

By Kasha Patel and Ellen Francis   02/07/22  
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…
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An Extraordinary Iceberg Is Gone, but Not Forgotten

By Henry Fountain   01/26/22  
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…
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Shifting Snow in the Warming U.S.

01/19/22  
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…
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There Was Way Too Much Lightning in the Arctic Last Year

By Brian Kahn   01/05/22  
That the Arctic is a hot mess due to climate change is well-established at this point. But it’s always nice to have a reminder of just how out of whack things are getting, isn’t it?
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Climate change has destabilized the Earth’s poles, putting the rest of the planet in peril

By Sarah Kaplan   12/14/21  
The ice shelf was cracking up. Surveys showed warm ocean water eroding its underbelly. Satellite imagery revealed long, parallel fissures in the frozen expanse, like scratches from some clawed monster. One fracture grew so big,…
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Rising From the Antarctic, a Climate Alarm

By Henry Fountain and Jeremy White   12/13/21  
The immense and forbidding Southern Ocean is famous for howling gales and devilish swells that have tested mariners for centuries. But its true strength lies beneath the waves.
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Ice shelf holding back keystone Antarctic glacier within years of failure

By Paul Voosen   12/13/21  
An alarming crackup has begun at the foot of Antarctica’s vulnerable Thwaites Glacier, whose meltwater is already responsible for about 4% of global sea level rise. An ice sheet the size of Florida, Thwaites ends…
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Greenland ice sheet experiences record loss to calving of glaciers and ocean melt over the past year

By Kasha Patel   11/23/21  
Greenland has had a quite a year. For the first time in its history, rain fell at its summit. In August, it experienced one of the latest-occurring melt events in recent memory. This also became…
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Icy ‘Glue’ May Control Pace of Antarctic Ice-Shelf Breakup

By Carol Rasmussen   10/12/21  
Researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California and the University of California, Irvine, have discovered an ice process that may have caused a Delaware-size iceberg to break off Antarctica’s immense Larsen C ice…
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NASA satellites show how clouds respond to Arctic sea ice change

By Roberto Molar Candanosa, NASA   09/23/21  
Clouds are one of the biggest wildcards in predictions of how much and how fast the Arctic will continue to warm in the future. Depending on the time of the year and the changing environment…
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Scientists scramble to harvest ice cores as glaciers melt

By Cassandra Garrison, Clare Baldwin and Marco Hernandez   09/14/21  
Scientists are racing to collect ice cores – along with long-frozen records they hold of climate cycles – as global warming melts glaciers and ice sheets. Some say they are running out of time. And,…
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Ghostly Satellite Image Captures the Arctic ‘Losing Its Soul’

By Gemma Tarlach   08/27/21  
“We started hearing a noise, like breaking, or coins falling,” says Marco Tedesco, a climate scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. He makes a loud, sustained crunching sound, recreating what he and his team heard,…
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Mount Shasta barely has any snow this year. Will it ever come back?

By Kurtis Alexander   08/25/21  
But this summer, the north state’s tallest peak is looking a little frail. Its slopes are drab and dusty, and most of the snow has melted away. Locals say they haven’t seen the mountain so…
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CNN

The amount of Greenland ice that melted on Tuesday could cover Florida in 2 inches of water

By Rachel Ramirez   07/30/21  
Greenland is experiencing its most significant melting event of the year as temperatures in the Arctic surge. The amount of ice that melted on Tuesday alone would be enough to cover the entire state of…
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Top US scientist on melting glaciers: ‘I’ve gone from being an ecologist to a coroner’

By Jyoti Madhusoodanan   07/21/21  
Diana Six’s love of the outdoors began before she could form words, run, or collect the bugs and fungi that were precious to her as a child. A tough home life eventually led her to…
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AP

Greenland suspends oil exploration because of climate change

07/16/21  
 The left-leaning government of Greenland has decided to suspend all oil exploration off the world’s largest island, calling it is “a natural step” because the Arctic government “takes the climate crisis seriously.”
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Thawing Permafrost has Damaged the Trans-Alaska Pipeline and Poses an Ongoing Threat

By David Hasemyer   07/11/21  
Thawing permafrost threatens to undermine the supports holding up an elevated section of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, jeopardizing the structural integrity of one of the world’s largest oil pipelines and raising the potential of an oil…
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Opinion: The Arctic’s ice is thinning faster than expected. It’s an ominous sign.

By Editorial Board   06/06/21  
Polar Bears struggling on thin Arctic ice is perhaps the most iconic image associated with climate change. Human-caused global warming is extreme near the poles, where the temperature is rising much faster than elsewhere. The…
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Melting of Greenland ice may accelerate as glaciers get shorter – study

By Tom Balmforth   05/18/21  
As the central-western Greenland ice sheet melts, it is also shrinking in height, with its surface exposed to warmer temperatures at lower altitudes that contributes further to melting, according to research published here on Monday…
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CNN

Melting ice in Antarctica could trigger chain reactions, bringing monsoon rains to the ice cap, study says

By Allison Chinchar   05/17/21  
The study, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, found that as Earth continues to heat up, the land underneath the Antarctic ice sheet will become more exposed. As a result of that process, wind patterns…
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Dry Soils And Drought Mean Even Normal Snowpack Can’t Keep Up With Climate Change In The West

By Michael Elizabeth Sakas   05/17/21  
Domonkos, the Colorado Snow Survey supervisor, gets to work measuring how much snowpack is left from the winter to runoff into streams, rivers and reservoirs this summer. These mountains trap snow in a natural reservoir.…
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Antarctica’s Doomsday Glacier: How Doomed Are We?

By Jeff Goodell   05/12/21  
Two new papers offer radically different predictions of the glacier’s future — and thus for the future of low-lying cities around the world. Here’s how to understand the divergent projections
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Receding glaciers causing rivers to suddenly disappear

By Jenna Kunze   05/03/21  
As glaciers around the world recede rapidly owing to global warming, some communities are facing a new problem: the sudden disappearance of their rivers. River piracy, or stream capture, is when water from one river…
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DW

Melting ice: What’s the big deal?

By Stuart Braun   04/30/21  
The melting of the polar ice caps has often been portrayed as a tsunami-inducing Armageddon in popular culture. In the 2004 disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow, the warming Gulf Stream and North Atlantic currents…
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Antarctic ice-sheet melting to lift sea level higher than thought, study says

By Harvard University   04/30/21  
Global sea level rise associated with the possible collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet has been significantly underestimated in previous studies, meaning sea level in a warming world will be greater than anticipated, according…
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Glacier Is Surging Down Denali Mountain in Alaska

By Chelsea Harvey   04/12/21  
Muldrow Glacier, perched on the side of Alaska’s highest peak, is on the move for the first time in more than 60 years. Scientists noticed last month that the 39-mile stretch of ice had begun…
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Guest post: The fate of Antarctic ice shelves at 1.5C, 2C and 4C of warming

By Dr. Ella Gilbert   04/08/21  
Antarctica’s ice shelves – the floating tongues of ice formed where the ice sheet meets the ocean – are especially useful indicators of a warming climate. Sandwiched between the atmosphere and ocean, they can be melted from above or below.
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