Monday, November 27th, 2017
Monitoring ocean salinity is essential for understanding its impact on ocean circulation, Earth’s water cycle, marine ecology and climate change. Ocean salinity in the Arctic is of particular interest, because it changes significantly with seasonal ice cover and is expected to decrease as the Greenland ice sheet melts and releases massive amounts of freshwater. Despite
Monday, September 18th, 2017
Operation IceBridge is flying in Greenland to measure how much ice has melted during the summer. The flights, which began on Aug. 25, 2017, and will go on until Sept. 21, 2017, repeat paths flown this spring and aim to monitor seasonal changes in the elevation of the ice sheet. “We started to mount these
Monday, October 24th, 2016
A new study using NASA satellite data finds that tide gauges—the longest and highest-quality records of historical ocean water levels—may have underestimated the amount of global average sea-level rise that occurred during the 20th century. A research team led by Philip Thompson, associate director of the University of Hawaii Sea Level Center in the School
Thursday, May 5th, 2016
Scientists studying data from the top of the Greenland ice sheet have discovered that during winter in the center of the world’s largest island, temperature inversions and other low-level atmospheric phenomena effectively isolate the ice surface from the atmosphere — recycling water vapor and halting the loss or gain of ice. A team of climate
Friday, April 29th, 2016
HANOVER, N.H. – Surface meltwater draining through and underneath Greenland’s tidewater glaciers is accelerating their loss of ice mass, according to a Dartmouth study that sheds light on the relationship between meltwater and subglacial discharge. The findings appear in the journal Annals of Glaciology. A PDF is available on request. Greenland has the potential to
Wednesday, April 6th, 2016
EUGENE, Ore., April 5, 2016—Erosion by summertime melt-driven streams on Greenland’s ice sheet shapes landscapes similarly to, but much faster than, rivers do on land, says a University of Oregon geologist. The approach used to study the ice sheet should help to broaden scientific understanding of melt rates and improve projections about glacial response to
Monday, April 4th, 2016
A new study by researchers from Denmark and Canada’s York University, published in Geophysical Research Letters, has found that the climate models commonly used to simulate melting of the Greenland ice sheet tend to underestimate the impact of exceptionally warm weather episodes on the ice sheet. The study investigated the causes of ice melt during
Friday, December 19th, 2014
SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 18, 2014—The Greenland Ice Sheet is ready for its close-up. The highest-resolution satellite images ever taken of that region are making their debut. And while each individual pixel represents only one moment in time, taken together they show the ice sheet as a kind of living body—flowing, crumbling and melting out to sea.
