See the World Through Science

Glaciers & Cryosphere

Environment
What Opens the Cracks in Antarctic Sea Ice? A Machine Ranked the Culprits
Picture the winter sea ice around Antarctica not as a solid lid but as a shifting, fracturing crust. Cracks tear it open: narrow lines called leads and larger stretches of open water near the coast…
By Andreja Jezernik4h ago3 min read
Environment
How Antarctica's Ice Streams Quietly Reorganized Over the Last 3,000 Years
On the satellite maps that glaciologists have relied on for four decades, the ice streams of West Antarctica look fixed. Rivers of ice hundreds of kilometers long slide toward the Ross Sea between…
By Andreja Jezernik6h ago4 min read
Environment
A Tunnel Inside Germany's Highest Mountain Has Measured Its Ice for 17 Years
Once a month, someone walks into a private tunnel bored under the summit ridge of the Zugspitze, sprays salt water onto a line of steel electrodes fixed in the limestone, and sends an electric…
By Andreja Jezernik2 days ago5 min read
Environment
An AI Model Maps Alaska's Shrinking Tundra, Plant by Plant
From a satellite's usual vantage, the seam where Alaska's boreal forest gives way to open tundra looks like a smudge, a gradual fade from green to brown across hundreds of miles. Up close it is…
By Anna Kotlyar2 days ago3 min read
Environment
Antarctica's Coldest Ice Shelves May Be the Most Sensitive to Warming
The Ross and Filchner-Ronne ice shelves are the two largest floating slabs of ice on the planet, and by the usual reading they are the least troubled. Their summers are cold, their surfaces stay…
By Andreja Jezernik1w ago5 min read
Environment
Why the Ice at the Bottom of a Glacier Glows Blue, Then Whitens Within Hours
Watch a fresh iceberg roll over in Greenland's Ilulissat Icefjord and, for a while, it wears two colors. The part that rode above the waterline is the flat white of ordinary glacier ice. But the…
By Andreja Jezernik1w ago4 min read
Environment
The Himalayan Glacier With the Longest Memory Is Running out of Time
High in Nepal's Shorong region sits a glacier that scientists have been watching longer than almost any other in the Himalayas. It has no famous name, only a code from an old survey: AX010. For…
By Anna Kotlyar3w ago3 min read
Environment
One Glacier, Two Fates: A Natural Experiment in South Greenland
Rarely does nature set up its own controlled experiment. At Qooqqup Sermia, in the fjord country south of Narsarsuaq, it has done exactly that. A single stream of ice flows down from the interior and…
By Andreja Jezernik3w ago3 min read
Environment
Mid-May Is the Hinge: An Early Thaw and a Green Summer in the Altai
Spring in the Altai arrives as a boundary moving down through the soil. The frozen layer that has held since autumn softens from the top, water becomes available to roots, and whatever grows there…
By Anna Kotlyar4w ago3 min read
Environment
Greenland Cooled for Four Decades Before It Began Warming Fast
For most of the second half of the twentieth century, Greenland did something the rest of the planet was not doing. It got colder. While global mean temperature climbed, the annual mean at the…
By Anna Kotlyar4w ago4 min read
Environment
Spy Satellites, Survey Flights and the Svalbard Glaciers Nobody Was Watching
In the summers of 1936 and 1938, two Norwegian expeditions led by the geologist Adolf Hoel flew cameras over Svalbard and came home with 5,507 photographs. They were taken to make maps. Twenty-six…
By Andreja Jezernik1mo ago5 min read