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A large sponge, a cluster of anemones, and other life is seen nearly 230 meters deep under a recently calved iceberg. Credit Schmidt Ocean Institute. =========================================================================== After an iceberg in Antarctica measuring roughly the size of Chicago suddenly broke off into the Bellinghausen Sea in January, scientists aboard the Schmidt Ocean Institute’s R/V Falkor (too) were shocked to find a thriving community of diverse organisms living underneath. The team says witnessing an iceberg of this size break off in real time was unexpected. However, it provided the group already aboard the vessel with a unique opportunity to investigate how these...

Scientists have looked back in time to reconstruct the past life of Antarctica’s “Doomsday Glacier” — nicknamed because its collapse could cause catastrophic sea level rise. They have discovered it started retreating rapidly in the 1940s, according to a new study that provides an alarming insight into future melting. The Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica is the world’s widest and roughly the size of Florida. Scientists knew it had been losing ice at an accelerating rate since the 1970s, but because satellite data only goes back a few decades, they didn’t know exactly when significant melting began. Now there is...

Venezuela lost its final glacier this year. The Greenland Ice Sheet is losing, on average, 30 million tons of ice per hour. Ice loss from the Thwaites Glacier, also known as the “Doomsday” glacier because its collapse could precipitate rapid Antarctic ice loss, may be unstoppable. These are just a few of the stark findings from more than 50 leading snow and ice scientists, which are detailed in a new report from the International Cryosphere Climate Initiative. The report summarizes the state of snow and ice in 2024: In short, experts agree, it’s been a horrible year for the frozen...

Over the past few decades, earth scientists have grappled with the concept of solar geoengineering: cooling the rapidly warming planet by injecting particles high into the atmosphere to reflect sunlight, for example. Now, researchers are proposing a new way to battle the effects of climate change that could prove even more costly and controversial: glacial geoengineering, designed to slow sea level rise. A white paper, released on 11 July by glaciologists who conducted a series of workshops and town halls over the course of 10 months, calls for boosting research into daring plans that would protect vulnerable ice sheets by...

Archaeologists conducting surveys of retreating ice patches have found perishable artefacts associated with ancient mining activities. The study, published in the Journal of Field Archaeology, reports that the researchers have found over 50 perishable artefacts near Goat Mountain and the Kitsu Plateau, located in northern British Columbia, Canada. Among the artefacts are stitched containers made from birch bark, wooden walking staffs, intricately carved and beveled sticks, an atlatl dart foreshaft, and a boot crafted from stitched hide. According to the researchers: “Most of the perishable artefacts were manufactured from wood, including birch bark containers, projectile shafts, and walking staffs. Of...

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is in Nepal as part of a flying four-day visit and paused Monday to issue the latest in a long string of dire climate warnings, declaring there is no future on the planet for fossil fuel. “The rooftops of the world are caving in,” Guterres said on a visit to the Everest region in the mountainous country, adding it had lost nearly a third of its ice in just over three decades. “Glaciers are icy reservoirs –- the ones here in the Himalayas supply fresh water to well over a billion people,” he said, according to...

A third of global glaciers located at World Heritage sites will disappear by 2050, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) warned on Thursday. Among the glaciers to vanish will be those at Yellowstone National Park, Yosemite National Park and Mount Kilimanjaro, according to UNESCO. While those glaciers will melt regardless of efforts to limit temperature increases, it is possible to save the remaining two thirds of glaciers at these 50 sites, the organization stressed in a new report. But to do so, the authors cautioned, global heating must not exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit,...

FIERCE COLD SWEEPS ANTARCTICA, DRIVES THE CONTINENT 4.4C BELOW 1979-2000 AVERAGE.. Not that the MSM cares, but Antarctica has suffered a fiercely cold last 18-or-so months — cold that is refusing to abate. According to the official data, yet contrary to the mainstream’s ‘heat induced catastrophe’ narrative, between April and September 2021, the South Pole’s temperature averaged a penguin-hugging -61.1C (-78F). Simply put, this was the locale’s coldest six month spell ever recorded, one that comfortably usurped the South Pole’s previous coldest ‘coreless winter‘ on record, the -60.6C (-77F) from 1976 (solar minimum of weak cycle 20). ... Also worth...

Acrack widens in the San Rafael glacier in Chile's extreme south, and a ten-storey iceberg crashes into the lake by the same name -- a dramatic reminder of the impacts of global warming. In the lake San Rafael, about 100 icebergs float today, pieces broken off from the glacier that 150 years ago stretched out over two-thirds of the body of water now free of ice cover. The San Rafael glacier is one of 39 in the Northern Patagonian Ice Field (3,500 square kilometers or 1,350 square miles), which with the Southern Patagonian Ice Field (11,000 km2) in Chile's Aysen...

A new study suggests that a million years ago, glaciers began sticking more persistently to their beds, triggering cycles of longer ice ages. Here, ice discharged from Iceland’s Breiðamerkurjökull glacier on its way to the Atlantic ocean. Credit: Kevin Krajick/Earth Institute Why did glacial cycles intensify a million years ago? Researchers find clues on the bed of the Atlantic Ocean. Something big happened to the planet about a million years ago. There was a major shift in the response of Earth’s climate system to variations in our orbit around the Sun. The shift is called the Mid-Pleistocene Transition. Before the...

NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — Africa’s rare glaciers will disappear in the next two decades because of climate change, a new report warned Tuesday amid sweeping forecasts of pain for the continent that contributes least to global warming but will suffer from it most. The report from the World Meteorological Organization and other agencies, released ahead of the U.N. climate conference in Scotland that starts Oct. 31, is a grim reminder that Africa’s 1.3 billion people remain “extremely vulnerable” as the continent warms more, and at a faster rate, than the global average. And yet Africa’s 54 countries are responsible for...

When British environmental geochemist Jon Hawkings arrived in Greenland for the first time in 2012, he was impressed. “It’s mind-blowing: You look onto the horizon and it’s just ice and it goes on for 150, 200 kilometers at least.” He went to the Arctic with a group of international scientists. Their goal was to investigate the relationship between nutrients entering coastal ecosystems from glacial meltwater. But the group’s research took an unexpected turn. The scientists analyzed samples from meltwater rivers and fjords and found concentrations of dissolved mercury among the highest ever recorded. Despite it being a pristine and remote...

Snow clearing crews are still battling through Glacier National Park’s Going-to-the-Sun Road even as the calendar reads the second week of July. As of today, July 9, Montana’s infamous mountain pass remains closed. Two factors are responsible: 1) last winter’s above-average snowfall, and 2) persistent cold and terrible wintry conditions throughout the spring/summer of 2020. ... this year will likely break the current record for the road’s latest opening, which stands as July 13 in 2011. ... Serving as evidence of how the so-called climate experts can get it spectacularly wrong, let’s recall the predictions made by Montana’s National Park...

Fifty years ago, I helped organize Earth Day #1 programs on my college campus, calling attention to serious pollution problems that afflicted much of the USA. Over the ensuing decades, laws, regulations, and changed attitudes, practices and technologies reduced most of that pollution, often dramatically. I didn’t buy into the 1970 end-is-nigh, doom-and-gloom, billions-will-die hysteria that Ron Stein and Ron Bailey summarize, including the manmade global cooling crisis. I don’t buy it today, either – certainly not this year’s Earth Day focus on the alleged manmade global warming crisis, also blamed on emissions of carbon dioxide, the same gas that...

Every year, 150 climate scientists fly far into the wilderness and bore deep into Greenland’s largest glacier. Their work is complicated and important. The EastGRIP project is trying to understand how ice streams underneath the glacier are pushing vast amounts of ice into the ocean, and how this contributes to rising sea levels. But this year the drills will be silent. The ice streams will go unmeasured. The reason is the coronavirus. The fallout from measures to contain the outbreak have made the research impossible. Greenland is closed to foreigners. Its government is worried any outbreak could be particularly dangerous...

It must be really hard to have to report a story that flies in the face of CNN’s hype over climate change. CNN published a Jan. 7 story headlined “Glacier National Park is replacing signs that predicted its glaciers would be gone by 2020,” and admitted that “[i]n 2017, the park was told by the agency [U.S. Geological Survey (USGS)] that the complete melting off of the glaciers was no longer expected to take place so quickly due to changes in the forecast model.” The signs were put up over a decade ago, according to CNN.

Officials have begun the process of changing out signs in Glacier National Park in Montana declaring that the glacier would be gone by 2020. Gina Kurzmen, a spokeswoman for the park, said the signs were added more than 10 years ago to reflect the effects of climate change forecasts at the time. They change will more accurately reflect the fate of the glaciers now, she added. The new signs will reportedly read, “When they will completely disappear depends on how and when we act. One thing is consistent: the glaciers in the park are shrinking.” Kurzman said park officials were...

Glacier National Park in Montana put up some signs back during the Obama administration warning visitors to take their selfies quickly because the glaciers would be gone by the year 2020. Unfortunately for the prognosticators behind that project, while some of the glaciers have definitely shrunk a bit, they stubbornly remain in the mountains to this day. That’s a bit of an embarrassment, so clearly the signs need to come down or at least be altered. Unfortunately, they can’t manage to get the job done so the humorous signage is still in place for visitors to chuckle at. (Free...

The study focused on one specific glacier - Zongo Glacier in Bolivia. Dr de Magalhães Neto said: "Once deposited on the glacier, the [black carbon darkens] the snow/ice surface, which reduces its ability to reflect solar radiation - or sunlight." That darkened surface then absorbs more of the sun's energy, which amplifies melting. While the findings were significant, the researchers said they did not come as a huge surprise: the same process has been seen elsewhere in the world. "Greenland receives large amounts of black carbon from fossil-fuel origin due to North America and European industrialisation," said Dr de Magalhães...

A newly devised type of silica bead could help save melting glaciers from the onslaught of climate change, scientists say. The innovative new approach, developed by a company called Ice911, employs minuscule beads of 'glass' which are spread across the surface layer of glaciers. There they help to reflect light beating down on them and slow what has become a tremendous pace of melt throughout the last several years. 'I just asked myself a very simple question: Is there a safe material that could help replace that lost reflectivity?' Found of Ice911, Leslie Field, told Mother Jones. What they landed...