Antarctica’s ice sheet is retreating due to warm ocean water circulating beneath its floating edge, researchers from the UK Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling at the University of Leeds have found. The study, published in Nature Geoscience, shows that the Southern Ocean melted 1,463 square kilometers of Antarctica’s underwater ice between 2010 and 2016—an […]
Glaciers in Asia could shrink to one-third of their current size by the end of the century even if warming stays below 1.5 degrees C, according to new research. A study published Wednesday in the journal Nature finds that glaciers in the Tibetan plateau experience higher levels of warming than the global average. The study’s […]
By Alex Kirby Tropical storm Harvey is by any standard off the scale. Some parts of Texas have received in just over a week the rainfall they would normally expect in an entire year, and the storm is described as generating as much rain as would normally be seen only once in more than 1,000 […]
By Andy Rowell For months now America’s climate denying president, Donald Trump, has been manoeuvering to open up the Arctic to oil drilling, in another act of defiance against his predecessor, Barak Obama. Back in April, Trump signed an executive order to extend offshore oil and gas drilling to large parts of the Atlantic, Pacific […]
One of the biggest icebergs ever recorded has “finally” broken away from the Larsen C ice shelf in Antarctica, researchers studying the event announced. The iceberg, which will likely be dubbed A68, weighs more than a trillion tonnes, has a volume twice that of Lake Erie, and is about 5,800 square kilometers in size—roughly the […]
By Andy Rowell Any day now we will truly witness climate change in action. Within days at worst, maybe weeks at best, scientists predict that a huge section of the Larsen C ice shelf in Antarctica will break off into the ocean, in what is called a major “calving” event. The size of the U.S. […]
Scientists have had their eyes on Greenland as its iconic glaciers have begun disappearing due to a warming climate. But, what they didn’t expect to see was a whole new type of melting. The Rink Glacier, the largest glacier on the west coast of Greenland, was exhibiting some strange melting behaviors during the hot summers […]
By Tim Radford German scientists have worked out the process that could destroy an Antarctic ice shelf the size of Iraq. They predict that, in a few decades, the oceanographic machinery that keeps the Ronne-Filchner ice shelf in the Weddell Sea will fail. A warm ocean will begin to eat away at the 450,000 square […]
Warming temperatures have caused glaciers in Montana’s iconic Glacier National Park to shrink an average of 39 percent over the past 50 years, with some glaciers losing 82 percent of their mass since 1966, according to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). To be considered glaciers, ice masses must make up at least 25 acres, and […]