Sea ice forms in the Arctic and Antarctic in winter and retreats in summer, but it doesn’t disappear completely — at least not yet. The floating frozen seawater has a surprisingly strong influence on weather patterns and ocean circulation in the polar regions and beyond. Rapidly shrinking Arctic sea ice has been one of the […]
The sea ice cover in Canada’s Gulf of St. Lawrence is the lowest it has ever been since measurements began, and that is seriously bad news for the harp seals that are typically born on the ice. A cold-water mammal, harp seals rarely spend any time on land, National Geographic explained. Instead, they feed in […]
By Andrew Christ and Paul Bierman In 1963, inside a covert U.S. military base in northern Greenland, a team of scientists began drilling down through the Greenland ice sheet. Piece by piece, they extracted an ice core 4 inches across and nearly a mile long. At the very end, they pulled up something else – […]
By Jessica Corbett With temperatures across the globe — and particularly in the Arctic — rising due to lackluster efforts to address the human-caused climate crisis, one of the coldest towns on Earth is throwing its hat in the ring to host the 2032 Summer Olympics. Salla is located in Finland’s Lapland region and touts […]
Earth’s ice is melting 57 percent faster than in the 1990s and the world has lost more than 28 trillion tons of ice since 1994, research published Monday in The Cryosphere shows. “It was a surprise to see such a large increase in just 30 years,” said Thomas Slater, a study co-author. There have been […]
A first-of-its-kind study has examined the satellite record to see how the climate crisis is impacting all of the planet’s ice. The answer? Quite a lot. The rate of worldwide ice loss has increased by more than 60 percent in the past three decades, a study published in The Cryosphere on Monday found. “The ice […]
By Jeff Masters, PhD and Dana Nuccitelli Calendar year 2020 was an extreme and abnormal year, in so many ways. The global coronavirus pandemic altered people’s lives around the world, as did extreme weather and climate events. Let’s review the year’s top 10 such events. 1. Hottest Year on Record? The official rankings will not […]
Global warming is rapidly changing the Arctic into a region that is, “warmer, less frozen, and biologically changed in ways that are scarcely imaginable even a generation ago,” according to NOAA’s annual Arctic report card, released Tuesday. That description, from Rick Thoman, a University of Alaska scientist and one of the editors of the assessment, […]
A controversial new climate study has found that, even if greenhouse gas emissions were halted tomorrow, it might not be enough to stop temperatures from continuing to rise. The study, published in Scientific Reports Thursday, was conducted by two researchers at the BI Norwegian Business School. They used the ESCIMO climate model to determine that, […]