Very little is known about rainfall in Antarctica; precipitation falls as snow on the bitter cold ice-covered continent. But during the austral summer of 2013-2014, an Adélie penguin colony near Dumont d’Urville station on coastal Adélie Land experienced “unusual and dramatic rainfall event that occurred on January 1, 2014, and that was...
Antarctica
“We might (and I stress might) have already reached and passed a point where there is really no turning back for Thwaites, no matter what we as humans do to our climate,” Alastair Graham, the University of South Florida and co-author of the study. New data from under the ice stream...
The rift on Antarctica’s Brunt ice shelf has torn itself away from the glacier resulting in a massive iceberg that is known as A74. British Antarctic Survey has been monitoring the glacier for years. The shelf was at its largest extent for over 100 years. The Brits have relocated their research station twice...
Nobody has reported on this discouraging news as of yet. The last news I saw on Larsen D was from June of 2020, when satellites revealed cracks on the massive ice shelf. Suitland, MD — The Larsen-D Ice Shelf calved two more icebergs which are large enough to be named....
Antarctica researchers have become alarmed by a new finding that shows sub-glacial lakes under the Thwaites glacier are draining a significant amount of water to the bedrock under miles thick with ice. Once the lake water reaches the bedrock, it lubricates the glacier enough to create frictional heat at the bed...
The Independent writes on the intensification of melting on the Antarctic peninsula. Last year's melt season was the highest in forty years of satellite records. Antarctica’s Larsen C Ice Shelf experienced its highest rate of melting since records began 40 years ago from 2019-2020, a new study has found. The unprecedented melt at...
In 2019 John Kerry was awarded and accepted the Arctic Circle Prize in a speech to an assembly of climate scientists and other Arctic stakeholders in Reykjavik, Iceland. In his dramatic speech, Kerry, who has been nominated by President-Elect Joe Biden, to be the first ‘Climate Tsar’ in a cabinet-level position, declared a world...
It is no surprise to those who follow the deglaciation process in Antarctica and are aware of the real threat posed by these glacial behemoths to human civilization. Rapid sea-level rise is likely when Pine Island and Thwaites (A/K/A The Doomsday glacier) glaciers collapse and take all of West Antarctica with them....
“Oh yes Sapiens, you hungry little monkey, it's all about you” comment via Greenland Ice Sheet — Ice Sheet Melting Is Perfectly in Line With Our Worst-Case Scenario, Scientists Warn New research has found that 50-70% of Antarctica's glacier marine extensions are at risk of hydrofracture due to enormous meltwater lakes on the...
Devastating and scary news from the Arctic as Greenland has reached the tipping point. The melting of our northern freezer which allows our civilization to flourish has reached the point of no return, even if we cut our emissions to zero. The tipping point is where snowfall “that replenishes the ice...
Canada’s last fully intact ice caps have disappeared NASA satellites confirmed. The two ice caps are in the Northeast of Ellesmere Island, near Greenland. The ice caps formed during the Little Ice Age, they have succumbed to the intense heat waves blanketing the Arctic over the past several years. From the...
Antarctica is estimated to have a quarter of the world’s marine methane stores. Methane, a dangerous greenhouse gas ( 25% more potent than the greenhouse gas CO2), accelerates global heating, aggravating the planetary climate emergency and collapse of biodiversity. The first methane leak discovered in Antarctica is on the Wilkes Subglacial Basin...
Most of us have been experiencing warm to hot temperatures. It doesn’t appear that the misery will go away any time soon. There is a lot of news lately on our warming planet. I shared a few articles on the subject, but they barely scratch the surface of what is...
I am sharing some of the stories from the Arctic that have not received the media attention that they deserve. We can expect increasing wildfires, a busy and dangerous Atlantic storm season, and rising marine and land temperatures as a result of the incredible speed of the climate crisis. As we...
Not since the plague, also known as the Black Death, arrived in Europe in the early 1300s has the human population been more vulnerable to exotic disease. Black Death is estimated to have killed 30 to 60% of the population of Europe. With international transport of people and goods, dense...
“I find it hard to exaggerate the peril, this is the new extinction and we are half way through it. We are in terrible, terrible trouble and the longer we wait to do something about it the worse it is going to get.” Sir David Attenborough Antarctic and Arctic ice...
The most menacing glacier for coastal regions worldwide is the Thwaites glacier, aka the doomsday glacier, located in the active climate tipping point region of West Antarctica. Recently a new study found that Thwaites glacier’s marine extension’s underbelly is melting on all sides by warming ocean water. Researchers found that...
Pine Island Glacier is located in West Antarctica, has shed yet another major iceberg. The calving event is not unusual for this glacier. What is new is change over the years is that calving events have changed from a multi-year process to an annual process. The bergs from Pine Island...
Leading scientists have warned that nine of the tipping points identified over a decade ago are now active. One of those tipping points is the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS). Thwaites glacier, also known as the doomsday glacier, has been alarming scientists about a looming collapse that could raise sea...
From Antarctica to agricultural fields, plastic waste is everywhere across the globe. We should be very concerned as this is yet another threat to our ability to feed ourselves. We consume these plastics from our food and water. We don’t know what effect it is having on our bodies though...
The annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union was held on December 9 in San Francisco. There should be a lot of updated information on climate change released to the public in the coming weeks. Two items discussed was permafrost and glaciers, including those from Greenland and Antarctica. The other...
“Friends. Shit is getting well-serious. I am at my place at the very top of the Bellinger Valley. Smoke has completely saturated everything for days now. “Most of this evening I have heard the wind absolutely roaring on the escarpment above. These beasts are inexorably heading for Point Lookout and...
And what seems clear now is that Greenland is no longer changing in geological time. It is changing in human time. Jon Gertner, Yale Environment 360 ...
“Ice shelves are the most vulnerable parts of Antarctica’s ice sheet system and we know that they are shrinking, but what we didn’t know before this work was how that was impacting the grounded ice behind them.” Helen Amanda Fricker, Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Disheartening news out of Antarctica, once again,...
Yesterday not a single drop of rain fell on continental Australia. The Bureau of Meteorology was unable to identify any other day where this had happened before. It is a pattern of unrelenting dry conditions and wildfire that have been plaguing the country for months, and the bone-dry conditions are...
Three new studies raise the specter that the great ice platforms of the Antarctic continent are more unstable and susceptible to collapse than previously thought. Antarctica holds ninety percent of the world’s store of freshwater and would raise sea levels 230 feet if it all melts. East Antarctica’s ice is...
I keep vigil. Lots of activity on the world's largest reserve of fresh water. x Following the startling narrative of the IPCC report on the Oceans and Cryosphere, our open access paper came out yesterday in Nature Scientific Reports documenting >65,000 lakes on the surface of the East Antarctic Ice...
Large swathes of New South Wales and southern Queensland will face catastrophic weather events over the next few months. The reason is Antarctica's westerly winds, which control the Australian climate, are impacted by 'sudden stratospheric warming.' As a result, the direst prediction is a change in Australia's rainfall patterns. The...
“We found that melt rates are significantly higher than expected across the whole underwater face of the glacier – in some places 100 times higher than theory would predict.” – Rebecca Jackson Trouble with tidewater glaciers. The American Association for the Advancement of Science writes: The newly observed melt rates...
The earth’s sunscreen is interacting with climate change and is affecting marine and terrestrial systems in the Southern Hemisphere according to new research published in the journal Nature. From The New Polytechnic at Rensselaer: Increased solar radiation penetrating through the damaged ozone layer is interacting with the changing climate, and the...
A NASA study found that Antarctica’s sea ice plunged from record highs to record lows in just three years (2014-2017). The difference is the loss of an area the size of Mexico. Seth Borenstein of the Associated Press writes:: The amount of ice circling Antarctica is suddenly plunging from a...
The Paris Climate Accord goal of limiting temperature rise to 1.5 Celsius was to prevent runaway climate change (the world is currently at a 1C increase above preindustrial temperatures ). The study authors did note that humanity can avoid the loss of the Antarctic Peninsula by keeping temperature rise to...
The climate is extremely complicated and overwhelming for those of us that are not scientists. One thing we know for sure about humanity's massive science project with our atmosphere, however, is that pumping unfathomable amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere damages the interconnectivity of Earths ecosystems resulting in a cascading...