Topic: Ice and Glaciers

Chasing Ice.

Ice-Free Arctic in Pliocene, Last Time CO2 Levels above 400 PPM. Scientific American. May, 2013.

Signs From Earth: The Big Thaw. National Geographic.

‘Fundamentally unstable’: Scientists confirm their fears about East Antarctica’s biggest glacier. Chris Mooney, Washington Post. May 18, 2016.

The doomsday glacier problem. Will Denayer, Flassbeck Economics. Nov. 23, 2017.

An ice-free Arctic by next year. Apr. 30, 2017. See more rocks. video (9 min)

"A runaway greenhouse effect is currently underway and it is causing the planet to warm exponentially fast."

"Even more concerning is the fact that there is a truly immense frozen methane deposit underneath the Laptev Sea in the Arctic. If the Arctic gets too warm then this methane will be released and it will be the end of all life on Earth. This already started happening in the early 2000s, but is becoming increasingly worse."

Jason Box on abrupt climate change. Faster than forecast: the story ice tells about abrupt anthropocene climate change. See more rocks. May 1, 2017. video

Arctic sea ice extent: 1979 to 2014. NSIDC via youtube.

Watch 25 years of Arctic Sea ice disappear in 1 minute. NOAA, via Climate Central, via youtube.

Our time is running out; the Arctic sea ice is going. interview with Prof. Peter Wadhams, Cambridge. via youtube. video (33 min)

Thin ice: Vanishing ice only exacerbates a bad, climate change-fueler situation. Conor Purcell, ArsTechnica.

According to NASA scientists and the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), sea ice in the Arctic appears to have reached its lowest maximum wintertime extent ever recorded.

Scientists stunned by Antarctic rainfall and a melt area bigger than Texas. Chris Mooney, WashPo. Jun. 15, 2017.

It's Raining in Antarctica While Trump Slashes Climate Science Funding. Dahr Jamail, truth-out. Jul. 3, 2017.

Antarctic Dispatches: Miles of ice collapsing into the sea. NYT. interactive.


Climate change accelerating rising sea levels. University of Waterloo. June 13, 2018.

A new study from the University of Waterloo discovered that rising sea levels could be accelerated by vulnerable ice shelves in the Antarctic. 

The study, by an international team of polar scientists led by Canada Research Chair Christine Dow of Waterloo’s Faculty of Environment, discovered that the process of warmer ocean water destabilizing ice shelves from below is also cracking them apart from above, increasing the chance they’ll break off. 

“We are learning that ice shelves are more vulnerable to rising ocean and air temperatures than we thought,” said Dow. “There are dual processes going on here. One that is destabilizing from below, and another from above. This information could have an impact on our projected timelines for ice shelf collapse and resulting sea level rise due to climate change.”

Antarctic ice loss has tripled in a decade. If that continues, we are in serious trouble. Chris Mooney. WashPo. June 13, 2018.

Antarctica’s ice sheet is melting at a rapidly increasing rate, now pouring more than 200 billion tons of ice into the ocean annually and raising sea levels a half-millimeter every year, a team of 80 scientists reported Wednesday. 

The melt rate has tripled in the past decade, the study concluded. If the acceleration continues, some of scientists’ worst fears about rising oceans could be realized

Polar amplification dominated by local forcing and feedbacks. Nature Climate Change. Nov. 19, 2018.

Accelerating changes in ice mass within Greenland, and the ice sheet’s sensitivity to atmospheric forcing. Michael Bevis et al, PNAS. Jan. 22, 2019.