Antarctic ice shelves – the hidden villain

Posted on 18/04/2013 by Bethan Davies

Sea ice and ice shelves

What is sea ice? Sea ice is frozen sea water; it perennially expands and contracts during each year’s winter and summer. Amongst the sea ice are icebergs calved from tidewater glaciers and ice shelves. Melting sea ice does not contribute directly to sea level rise (ice floats and displaces the same volume of water), but sea ice is important because it enhances climate warming. It changes the reflectivity of the sea water, reflecting lots of sunlight back (it has a high albedo), and is therefore an important component of the climate and cryospheric (icey) system.
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Future sea level rise from ice sheets

Posted on 28/03/2013 by Bethan Davies

A new paper in Nature Climate Change by Bamber and Aspinall attempts to untangle the thorny problem of how quickly and how much the ice sheets of the world will melt. The rate at which ice sheets melt is difficult to understand, because there are many processes that occur. Continue reading →

Antarctica’s contribution to global sea level rise

Posted on 17/01/2013 by Bethan Davies

How much ice is there in Antarctica? And if it were to melt, how much would global sea levels rise, and how quickly? Continue reading →

Arctic Sea Ice

Posted on 02/10/2012 by Bethan Davies

The Arctic’s sea ice extent reached an all-time low in September 2012, with the smallest recorded extent since satellite observations began. At 3.42 million square kilometres, it may still sound large, but this small extent of Arctic sea ice could have profound long-term consequences, and it follows a long trend of low sea ice conditions. Sea ice extent has been decreasing over the past 4-5 decades (Kinnard et al., 2011), and sea ice extent is now about 2 million square kilometres less than it was during the late twentieth century. Continue reading →

Greenland Melting

Posted on 06/08/2012 by Bethan Davies

In this new website, www.greenlandmelting.com, you can browse maps of the surface melt on Greenland in each year from 1979. You can also look at years with extreme melt events, such as 2010 and 2011.

Climate Change Sceptics

Posted on 09/07/2012 by Bethan Davies

Proving Climate Change

When reading the New Scientists’ focus on Climate Change, I was struck by the number of comments along the lines of, ‘This is theory, we won’t believe it until you prove it’. Two things came to my attention. Firstly, that climate change has been accorded almost myth or religious-like status, and has become something that you can either ‘believe’ or ‘disbelieve’. Secondly, that many people are profoundly naive about the way in which science works. And so I was motivated to write a brief piece about scientific research design. Stay with me now – I’ll make it as interesting as possible! Continue reading →