Glaciers are important for their beauty, cultural importance, ecosystem services such as water resources, economic value, and potential to raise global sea levels. This is an impassioned plea to recognise the value of our glaciers worldwide, and to protect them to the best of our ability. Globally shrinking glaciers Glaciers exist in pretty well every …
Glaciated regions present a wide range of glacial resources, from drinking water to tourism and from hydroelectric power to mining. However, as the climate warms and glacial regions change, these resources are under threat, and communities will need to start adapting in order to maintain livelihoods and economic development. Glacial water resources The first of …
In 2022, the Royal Meteorological Society hosted an online event that explored the impact of climate change at the world’s three poles: the Arctic, the Antarctic and the Himalaya, in partnership with the Grantham Institute. Watch the online event here: Abstract Climate change is having rapid and dramatic impacts on glacier ice and snow at …
Climate change and the world’s three poles (Video) Read More »
Earth’s glaciers are shrinking at an alarming rate. Each year they are losing more mass than is being replenished in each accumulation season.28 trillion tonnes of ice was lost from 1994 to 2017, and rates have risen by 57% since the 1990s. At present, global ice volume is shrinking at a rate of 267±16 Gt/year, …
What does COP26 mean for global glacier and ice sheet change? Read More »
This Storymap series produced by esri UK and the Met Office explores the impact that modern-day climate change will have on the UK. The series investigates six key areas where climate change will cause the most disruption, which includes fire, flooding, agriculture, transport, energy, and health. When studying the effects of climate change in glaciated …
In a new article in the journal Nature, Stephen Rintoul and colleagues present two very different visions of Antarctica’s future, from the perspective of an observer looking back from 2070. In one vision, humanity continues to exploit Earth’s natural resources (such as fossils fuels) and does little to protect the environment, and in the other, …
Climate change on the Antarctic Peninsula | Glacier fluctuations on James Ross Island | Glacier modelling experiments | Summary and conclusions | Further reading | Modelled glacier response to centennial temperature and precipitation trends on the Antarctic Peninsula This article is a summary of the following paper: Davies, B.J., Golledge, N.R., Glasser, N.F., Carrivick, J.L., …
Why use ice cores? | How do ice cores work? | Layers in the ice | Information from ice cores | Further reading | References | Comments | Why use ice cores? Ice sheets have one particularly special property. They allow us to go back in time and to sample accumulation, air temperature and air …
Ice cores are the time machines that allow us to investigate past climate. They preserve actual bubbles of air that mean that we can look at past concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. They allow us to reconstruct past temperature and precipitation changes, and help us understand relationships between the composition of the atmosphere …
How much ice is there in Antarctica? And if it were to melt, how much would global sea levels rise, and how quickly?
