The slopes of a giant Martian volcano, once covered in glacial ice, may have been home to one of the most recent habitable environments yet identified on Mars, according to new research led by Brown University geologists. Nearly twice as tall as Mount Everest, Arsia Mons (pictured) is the third tallest volcano on Mars and […]
Thinning of the largest icefields in the southern hemisphere (excluding Antarctica) has accelerated sharply, with a new study showing Patagonian glaciers are losing ice faster than ever before. The collaborative study, penned by scientists from Cornell University and the Center for Scientific Studies in Chile, appears in Geophysical Research Letters. Earlier studies determined that between […]
A University of Colorado at Boulder study indicates meltwater periodically overwhelms the interior drainpipes of Alaska’s Kennicott Glacier, causing it to lurch forward. Similar processes may be behind the acceleration of glaciers observed recently on the Greenland ice sheet, write the researchers in Nature Geoscience. According to CU-Boulder Professor Robert Anderson, the amount of water […]
The behavior of two of Greenland’s largest glaciers underlines the problem in assuming that glacial melting and sea level rise will occur at a steady upward pace, reports a new study inScience. Between 2004 and 2005, the two glaciers in question shrank dramatically and dumped twice as much ice into the sea as had been […]
European Alpine glacial cover will decrease by 80 percent if summer temperatures increase by 5 degrees Fahrenheit, say scientists from the University of Zurich, and will disappear completely by 2100 if temperatures reach 9 degrees Fahrenheit. These alarming predictions, based on numerical modeling experiments, are due to be published in the July 15th edition ofGeophysical […]
Researchers from the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) conducting a study of Antarctic glaciers have found that over the last 50 years, 87 percent of the 244 glaciers studied have retreated, and that average retreat rates have accelerated. The study was based on aerial and satellite photographs and was published […]
In findings reported in Nature, Greenland’s Jakobshavn Isbrae, the world’s fastest moving glacier, doubled its speed between 1997 and 2003. Researchers believe the rapid movement of ice from land into the sea provides key evidence of newly discovered relationships between ice sheets, sea level rise and climate warming. Jakobshavn Isbrae is Greenland’s largest outlet glacier, […]
NASA, Canadian, and European satellites have observed worrying increases in the flow of glaciers into the open ocean, following the breakup of ice shelves in Antarctica. Two reports appearing in Geophysical Research Lettersused different techniques to arrive at similar results, suggesting climate warming can lead to rapid rises in sea level. Researchers from NASA’s Jet […]
