Slush – water-soaked snow – makes up more than half of all meltwater on the Antarctic ice shelves during the height of summer, yet is poorly accounted for in regional climate models.
Heavy pooling meltwater can fracture ice, potentially leading to ice shelf collapse
Some estimates of Antarctica’s total contribution to sea-level rise may be over- or underestimated, after researchers detected a previously unknown source of ice loss variability.
Using satellite data to ‘see in the dark’, researchers have shown for the first time that lakes on the Greenland Ice Sheet drain during winter, a finding with implications for the speed at which the world’s second-largest ice sheet flows to the ocean.
The filling and draining of meltwater lakes has been found to cause a floating Antarctic ice shelf to flex, potentially threatening its stability.
As the death toll continues to rise in Nepal, Senior Lecturer Dr Ian Willis, and PhD student Evan Miles, from the Scott Polar Research Institute contemplate the fate of people in a remote part of the country, where they have been doing research for the past two years.
In the eleventh of a series of reports contributed by Cambridge researchers, glaciologists Dr Ian Willis and Alison Banwell watch as a lake disappears before their eyes.
Scientists from the Scott Polar Research Institute (SPRI) have raised concerns regarding what they believe are erroneous claims of a 15% decrease in the permanent ice cover of Greenland in just 12 years.
The largest coordinated programme of international polar activities in 50 years – International Polar Year (IPY) – kicked off globally on 1 March 2007. Building on a 125-year history of previous polar events in 1882–1883, 1932–1933 and 1957–1958, the aim of IPY is to promote even greater international scientific collaboration to address issues of global importance within the Arctic and Antarctic.
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