Home

On:

The results of two new studies regarding Antarctic glaciers have been released, and the results of each shocked the researchers conducting them, including the first on-site survey of the Totten Ice Shelf, and the first large-scale survey of the Antarctic continent as a whole. Additionally, the results of the two studies do not paint an optimistic picture for the stability of our southern continent’s glaciers.
read more

On:

Earlier this month, the North Atlantic experienced a rare January hurricane, named Hurricane Alex. While Alex’s northward track kept it in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, it’s arrival in the waters south of Greenland coincided with a sudden outflowing of meltwater through a bay in the Western Greenland, indicating that the warm winds that accompanied Alex had triggered a melting event.
read more

On:

A recent study has indicated that the Jakobshavn Glacier in Greenland is experiencing a rapid melt that threatens to raise sea levels by up to one centimeter.

The glacier, which is thought to have yielded the iceberg that ended the Titanic’s fated voyage, has begun to melt at an alarming rate, about four times faster than it was reducing in the 1990s. This puts it at the top of the glacier-melting charts, making it the fastest flowing river of ice in the world.

The recent research project, published in the Cryosphere journal, examined images from the German TerraSAR-X satellites to monitor the speed of the glacier.
read more

On:

A new satellite survey of over 2,000 glaciers shows that most of them are now shrinking. Scientists are concerned about melting glaciers as far apart as Mount Kilimanjaro, the Himalayas and Glacier National Park in Montana. New photographs taken by NASA?s Terra spacecraft show the shrinkage is dramatic and happening on a global scale.

Rick Wessels of the U.S. Geographical Survey compared thousands of the new images to aerial photographs dating back 20 years. ?Some glaciers are more like snowbanks,? he said. Mount Kilimanjaro has lost 82 percent of its ice since 1912 and scientists calculate that it will lose all of its snow between 2010 and 2020.
read more