This summer has hit Europe hard with heat waves and drought, and there’s no better gauge for the extremity of the situation than the Swiss Alps, where glaciers have been melting at an unprecedented pace. The mountains have been warming so quickly due to the climate crisis that the bare earth of a mountain pass […]
Usually, humans huddle up in blankets to stay warm in the winter. For the glaciers of Switzerland, however, the opposite is true. A ski resort in the Swiss Alps is using blankets to protect a glacier from melting in the summer sun. “We lay the fleece over the glacier like a natural protective shield,” Gian […]
By Jake Johnson This past weekend, researchers at the National Science Foundation’s Summit Station observed rainfall at the peak of Greenland’s rapidly melting ice sheet for the first time on record — an event driven by warming temperatures. “This was the third time in less than a decade, and the latest date in the year […]
Thousands of scientists reiterated calls for immediate action over the climate crisis in an article published Wednesday in the journal BioScience. “The extreme climate events and patterns that we’ve witnessed over the last several years — not to mention the last several weeks — highlight the heightened urgency with which we must address the climate […]
Researchers have uncovered 33 viruses preserved in ancient glacier ice, and 28 of them are previously unknown to science. The research, published in Microbiome on Tuesday, was based on two ice samples from the Tibetan Plateau in China that are nearly 15,000 years old. It offers an example of how scientists can study glaciers to […]
By Isabela Martel When British environmental geochemist Jon Hawkings arrived in Greenland for the first time in 2012, he was impressed. “It’s mind-blowing: You look onto the horizon and it’s just ice and it goes on for 150, 200 kilometers at least.” He went to the Arctic with a group of international scientists. Their goal […]
The Pine Island Glacier is currently Antarctica‘s greatest contributor to sea level rise, and, now, a new study warns that it could be closer to collapse than previously thought. The research, published in Science Advances Friday, found that the vulnerable glacier had sped up by 12 percent over the last three years as the ice […]
On May 10, 1996, an unexpected storm engulfed the summit of Mt. Everest, killing eight climbers. At the time, it was the deadliest disaster in the mountain’s history. Twenty-five years later, scientists and the mountaineering community are still taking steps toward safer expeditions. But with the climate crisis taking its own toll on the mountain, […]
By Brett Wilkins Researchers warned of the need for urgent climate action as a study published Wednesday revealed that the world’s mountain glaciers are melting at an unprecedented pace, with glacial thinning rates outside Antarctica and Greenland doubling this century. For the first time ever, researchers analyzed three-dimensional satellite measurements of the world’s approximately 220,000 […]