Freshly exposed bedrock at the terminus of Brewster Glacier in March 2023. Andrew Lorrey, CC BY-SA As the austral summer draws to a close, we are preparing to fly over the Southern Alps to survey glaciers. This annual flight supports the longest scientific study of Aotearoa New Zealand’s icescapes – and it shows that all of our glaciers have retreated since 1978. This year’s survey comes on the heels of the warmest year on record globally and the second warmest for New Zealand, which produced extreme weather events and impacts that still cut deep for many local communities. Despite strong El N ..read more

Too much fresh water from Greenland's ice sheet can slow the Atlantic Ocean's circulation. Paul Souders/Stone via Getty Images Superstorms, abrupt climate shifts and New York City frozen in ice. That’s how the blockbuster Hollywood movie “The Day After Tomorrow” depicted an abrupt shutdown of the Atlantic Ocean’s circulation and the catastrophic consequences. While Hollywood’s vision was over the top, the 2004 movie raised a serious question: If global warming shuts down the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, which is crucial for carrying heat from the tropics to the northern latitud ..read more

Sarah Nance at the Bonneville Salt Flats, Utah, 2019. Courtesy of Sarah Nance As an artist working across media, I’ve used everything from thread to my voice to poetically translate and express information. Recently, I’ve been working with another medium – geologic datasets. While scientists use data visualization to show the results of a dataset in interesting and informative ways, my goal as an artist is a little different. In the studio, I treat geologic data as another material, using it to guide my interactions with Mylar film, knitting patterns or opera. Data, in my work, functions expre ..read more

Ice on the Antarctic peninsula flowing along a channel into an ice shelf in the ocean. Hilmar Gudmundsson Pine Island glacier is one of the fastest flowing outlets of ice from the west Antarctic ice sheet, draining an area three-quarters the size of the UK. In recent decades, the glacier has been retreating rapidly and losing ice, contributing more to global sea level rise than any other Antarctic glacier. The speed of the glacier’s retreat and the rate that is has been losing ice has led to concerns about how stable the region is. Model results show that this region of west Antarctica could c ..read more

Richard Bates and Alun Hubbard kayak a meltwater stream on Greenland's Petermann Glacier, towing an ice radar that reveals it's riddled with fractures. Nick Cobbing. I’m striding along the steep bank of a raging white-water torrent, and even though the canyon is only about the width of a highway, the river’s flow is greater than that of London’s Thames. The deafening roar and rumble of the cascading water is incredible – a humbling reminder of the raw power of nature. As I round a corner, I am awestruck at a completely surreal sight: A gaping fissure has opened in the riverbed, and it is swall ..read more

As this year’s UN climate summit (COP28) gets under way in Dubai, scientists studying Earth’s frozen regions have been delivering an urgent call for action to policy makers. But is anyone listening? Throughout 2023, we have been warning of an impending series of crises occurring in the cryosphere – polar ice sheets, ice shelves, sea ice, mountain glaciers and permafrost. The Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR) released its decadal synopsis on the state of Antarctic climate change and ecosystems. It led the recent Antarctic Treaty meeting to issue the Helsinki Declaration to high ..read more

On a crisp, sunny day high in the Peruvian Andes, two German judges gaze across a mountain lake to the towering white glaciers in the distance. Dark spots are visible on the pristine ice and, in quiet moments, the cold wind carries the sounds of creaking and cracking. The judges, from the German city of Hamm, have flown more than 6,500 miles to witness the melting glaciers for themselves. It is May 2022 and their visit has taken more than three years to organise – and some intensive diplomatic negotiations between Peru and Germany. Also here, more than 4,500 metres above sea level, are five Ge ..read more

Glacial lakes are common in the Himalayas, as this satellite view shows. Some are dammed by glaciers, other by moraines. NASA In August 2023, residents of Juneau, Alaska, watched as the Mendenhall River swelled to historic levels in a matter of hours. The rushing water undercut the riverbank and swallowed whole stands of trees and multiple buildings. The source for the flood was not heavy rainfall – it was a small glacial lake located in a side valley next to the Mendenhall Glacier. Glacier-dammed lakes like this are abundant in Alaska. They form when a side valley loses its ice faster than th ..read more

Mayumi.K.Photography/Shutterstock Globally, there is about one volcano erupting each week. Volcanic unrest kills an average of 500 people every year and costs the global economy roughly US$7 billion (£5.7 billion). With one in 20 people living somewhere at risk of volcanic activity, every effort that can be made to improve the monitoring of volcanoes is important. This is especially true for volcanoes covered by glaciers – roughly 18% of all volcanoes on Earth. When these erupt, the consequences can be among the deadliest of all natural disasters. The Nevado del Ruiz volcano in Colombia killed ..read more

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