We’ve seen a lot of good maps of Earth’s polar regions of late. A map that shows the thickness of the entire Antarctic ice sheet. Another that shows Greenland’s hidden bedrock contours in unprecedented detail. But a new terrain map of Antarctica is still special. It’s not just the highest resolution ever produced for…
On September 15, NASA will launch a laser 310 miles above the Earth to scan our planet’s ice sheets like never before, recording changes in the elevation of these frozen landscapes down to the width of a pencil.
East Antarctica has long been hailed as a bastion of continuity in the rapidly unraveling Antarctic. The West Antarctic is the landscape where ice goes to die, while the higher elevation, colder eastern portion of the continent has been viewed as a stable landscape largely separated from rising temperatures and warm…
If you needed a visual representation of our global environmental crisis in 2018, it doesn’t get much better (well, worse) than the gigantic iceberg looming over the village of Innaarsuit in Greenland, now seen from the vantage of space.
Iceberg calving events are among the more epic spectacles on the planet. But rarely have humans been lucky enough to see them happen in real time, much less capture one on camera.
The Northwest Passage—the fabled maritime shortcut from the Bering Straight to the eastern Canadian Arctic—is increasingly becoming a real thing as climate change causes an Arctic meltdown. But as these icy waters become more and more navigable, the marine mammals who call them home face new threats.
The seas between the Arctic and Atlantic oceans are a battleground between two opposing bodies of water. And it appears that the Arctic is starting to lose the war. This is happening faster than models projected, and scientists don’t quite know what the long-term impacts will be.
A team of scientists has learned that the ground beneath West Antarctica’s most vulnerable glaciers is weirdly bouncy. The finding suggests this critical sector of the ice sheet might have a hidden defense against runaway collapse, but how much that helps us depends on if we take action to rein in climate change.
Three trillion tons of ice is an near impossible thing to wrap your head around. Even the standard comparisons—it’s 1.2 billion Olympic swimming pools—don’t really make it compute any better.
There’s no shortage of going-ons on Earth that astronauts can see from space: auroras, towering clouds, volcanic eruptions. Now, there’s a grim addition to the list: a (once) massive iceberg that’s got a date with death.
In the not-too-distant geologic past when global temperatures weren’t too much warmer than they are today, black flies called midges buzzed around a lake in northwest Greenland. Their discovery suggests temperatures could have routinely reached a balmy 50 degrees Fahrenheit in the summertime—a profound climactic…
If you came here looking for good Arctic sea ice news, I have some. Kidding, there’s no such thing as good Arctic sea ice news these days.
Antarctica’s icy mantle hides a truly fantastical world, and we’re still trying to understand its contours. Case in point: a new study has revealed three monstrous canyons on par with the Grand Canyon. The discovery is both wow-worthy and vital to understanding what will happen to Antarctica’s ice as it melts.
Our planet is a symphonic masterpiece. Whales, rivers, water birds, springs, and ice all there for the listening, and they sound spectacular. But humans are changing the planet’s tune and adding discordant notes to the natural score.
In recent years, warm winds have caused winter temperatures on the Antarctic Peninsula to spike well above freezing. The winds have spurred major melt, causing lakes to form on ice sheets that can eventually accelerate their collapse. Oh, and climate change could make the conditions that spurred the winds worse. Great!
The winter of discontent in the Arctic has morphed into a spring of discontent. Shocking new data shows that the region has lost almost all its old sea ice. Its disappearance, driven by warming waters and rising air temperatures, means the region is losing a bulwark against even more dramatic sea ice loss.
In August 2012, a monster cyclone roared to life over Siberia before moving out over the Arctic Ocean. Meteorologists watched, agog as the beast continued to gather strength for days, before finally dying out over the Canadian Archipelago.
Michelle LaRue has a problem: She only has one set of eyes.
The world’s largest hunk of ice, the Antarctic ice sheet, holds enough frozen water to put cities like Miami several hundred feet under. How much Antarctica shrinks in the future will depend on the balance between what’s melting away, and what’s being added when it snows.
The two most important words you need to know to understand the fate of our coastlines are “grounding line.” Those words describe where Antarctica’s voluminous ice shelves begin to float, holding back a wall of ice on land.
