News articles on ice shelves
Mongabay.com news articles on ice shelves in blog format. Updated regularly.
Greenland and Antarctica ice melt accelerating, pushing sea levels higher
(12/03/2012) A massive team of scientists have used multiple methods to provide the best assessment yet of ice loss at the world's poles, including Greenland and a number of Antarctic ice sheets. Their findings—that all major ice sheets are shrinking but one; that ice loss is speeding up; and that this is contributing to the rise in sea levels—add more evidence to the real-time impacts from global climate change. Melting ice sheets at the poles have raised sea levels 11.1 millimeters, or about 20 percent of observed sea level rise, in the past twenty years, according to the landmark study in Science.
Greenland suffers record melt
(08/16/2012) Four weeks before Greenland's melting season usually ends, it has already blown past all previous records. By August 8th, nearly a month before cooler weather usually sets in around the world's largest island, the island toppled the past record set in 2010.
Record 97 percent of Greenland's ice sheet experienced melting in July
(07/24/2012) 97 percent of Greenland's ice sheet experienced some degree of melting this July, a record extent of melt, says NASA.
The Cryosphere-Princeton primers in climate: A Book Review
(01/23/2012) The Cryosphere by Dr. Shawn J. Marshall, Canada Research Chair in Climate Change, University of Calgary, is an excellent book because it summarizes leading scientific
research into easily accessible chapters each one on a different component of the cryosphere. The cryosphere, which incorporates the Earth's snow and
ice mass including seasonal snow, permafrost (both land-based permafrost and below water permafrost), river and lake ice, sea ice, glaciers, ice
sheets, and ice shelves, is intrinsically related to global climate change. Hence, understanding how the cryosphere interacts with and is at risk
because of climate change and its greenhouse gases is fundamental to developing effective policy mechanisms that mitigate climate change.
Another record breaker: 2011 warmest La Niña year ever
(11/30/2011) As officials meet at the 17th UN Climate Summit in Durban, South Africa, the world continues to heat up. The UN World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has announced that they expect 2011 to be the warmest La Niña year since record keeping began in 1850. The opposite of El Nino, a La Niña event causes general cooling in global temperatures.
Climate change shocker: Canada's ice shelves halved in six years
(09/28/2011) After the Arctic sea ice extent hit its second lowest size on record this summer—or lowest (depending on the source)—comes another climate change shocker: in the past six years Canada's millennia-old ice shelves have shed nearly half their size. One ice shelf—the Serson shelf—is almost entirely gone, while another—the Ward Hunt shelf—has split into two distinct shelves. The ice shelves have lost 3 billion tons in this year alone.
