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Amsterdam – Greenpeace has called on governments meeting at the UN climate change conference COP31 next week to take urgent action to transition away from fossil fuels and step up climate finance as two major reports warned of the growing risk to the world’s cryosphere from global heating. The reports from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the International Cryosphere Climate Initiative (ICCI) outlined the large-scale and in many cases irreversible impacts to the the world’s melting ice sheets, permafrost, glaciers and sea ice as the global temperature edges towards an overshoot of the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C global warming goal. Dr. Jerry Jose, Senior Scientist at the Greenpeace International Science Unit said: “The accelerating loss of ice is an emergency demanding immediate and far-reaching action to limit the extent and duration of a 1.5°C overshoot. What we must understand is that the impacts to the cryosphere during overshoot are irreversible in most cases in human relevant time scales and will have global implications. “What was once viewed as a far-off consequence of climate change, the world’s melting ice is now impacting everyday life: accelerated global sea-level rise, reduced water security and worsening mountain hazards. The question now is how...

Greenland has now marked the 30th consecutive year where it lost more ice than it gained. Over the 12-month period…

Source: Ars Technica

Barnes Ice Cap sits on the central plateau of Baffin Island, in the Canadian Arctic. It is the last surviving fragment of the Laurentide Ice Sheet, the largest of the Pleistocene ice sheets, which at its peak buried most of Canada under two miles of ice and locked away around 80 meters of sea level. That remnant has now yielded direct physical evidence that ice sheets might have reversed their retreat and started to grow again thousands of years ago. In a recent Science study, researchers show that the Laurentide reached its smallest size about 3,600 years ago, then started re-expanding roughly 2,000 years ago, which the team interprets as the opening move of the next glaciation. Apparently, this brand-new ice age was on its way until about 1960, when human-caused climate warming reversed it. Frozen to the bed “Barnes is the last remaining piece of one of the domes of the Laurentide Ice Sheet,” says Nicolás Young, a geologist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and lead author of the study. As that enormous dome thinned through the Holocene, its margin withdrew up onto Baffin Island, and what’s left today is the deflated core of something that was once...

Unseen mountains, valleys, lakes, and rivers lie under Antarctica’s mile-thick ice sheet. Changes to those hidden rivers could have dramatic global consequences.

Stokes, C. R. et al. Response of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet to past and future climate change. Nature 608, 275–286 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-04946-0 (2022). Abram, N. J. et al. Emerging evidence of abrupt changes in the Antarctic environment. Nature 644, 621–633 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09349-5 (2025). Noble, T. L. et al. The sensitivity of the Antarctic Ice Sheet to a changing climate: past, present, and future. Rev. Geophys. 58, e2019RG000663 https://doi.org/10.1029/2019RG000663 (2020). Herraiz-Borreguero, L. & Naveira Garabato, A. C. Poleward shift of circumpolar deep water threatens the East Antarctic Ice Sheet. Nat. Clim. Change 12 728–734 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-022-01424-3 (2022). Otosaka, I. N. et al. Mass balance of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets from 1992 to 2020. Earth Syst. Sci. Data 15, 1597–1616 https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-15-1597-2023 (2023). Rignot, E. et al. Four decades of Antarctic Ice Sheet mass balance from 1979–2017. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 116, 1095–1103 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1812883116 (2019). Li, Q., England, M. H., Hogg, A. M., Rintoul, S. R. & Morrison, A. K. Abyssal ocean overturning slowdown and warming driven by Antarctic meltwater. Nature 615, 841–847 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-05762-w (2023). Gunn, K. L., Rintoul, S. R., England, M. H. & Bowen, M. M. Recent reduced abyssal overturning and ventilation in the Australian Antarctic Basin. Nat. Clim. Change...

Two of Earth's largest ice sheets have lost more than 12 trillion US tons of ice in just 47 years, according to a major report authored by 58 scientists from institutions around the world.

Over the past 230,000 years, the growth and retreat of the Icelandic ice sheet have led to major changes in the seawater chemistry of the North Atlantic, caused by the interaction between volcanism and ice in Iceland. Scientists at the Institute of Environmental Physics at Heidelberg University have demonstrated this using sediment cores from the northeastern Atlantic – the Rockall Plateau. The researchers analyzed the isotopic composition of the rare-earth element neodymium in these drill cores. According to their findings, the isotopic signal fluctuated significantly over the course of glacial and interglacial periods, following the “rhythm” of the ice ages, as shown by the studies led by Prof. Dr. Norbert Frank. The isotopic composition of neodymium (Nd) in seawater is one of the most commonly used tools for reconstructing how ocean circulation has changed in the recent geological past. The method is based on the central assumption that the chemical “fingerprints” characteristic of the composition of large water masses have remained largely constant over time. Research by the Heidelberg scientists now suggests that this fixed isotopic composition no longer applies to the North Atlantic during glacial periods. Their analyses of deep-sea sediments from the Rockall Plateau show that the chemistry...

Over the past 230,000 years, the growth and retreat of the Icelandic ice sheet have led to major changes in the seawater chemistry of the North Atlantic, caused by the interaction between volcanism and ice in Iceland. Scientists at the Institute of Environmental Physics at Heidelberg University have demonstrated this using sediment cores from the northeastern Atlantic – the Rockall Plateau. The researchers analyzed the isotopic composition of the rare-earth element neodymium in these drill cores. According to their findings, the isotopic signal fluctuated significantly over the course of glacial and interglacial periods, following the “rhythm” of the ice ages, as shown by the studies led by Prof. Dr. Norbert Frank. The isotopic composition of neodymium (Nd) in seawater is one of the most commonly used tools for reconstructing how ocean circulation has changed in the recent geological past. The method is based on the central assumption that the chemical “fingerprints” characteristic of the composition of large water masses have remained largely constant over time. Research by the Heidelberg scientists now suggests that this fixed isotopic composition no longer applies to the North Atlantic during glacial periods. Their analyses of deep-sea sediments from the Rockall Plateau show that the chemistry...

Most of us picture melting ice like water filling a bathtub: the level rises evenly, everywhere. That picture is wrong. The real rise is uneven, shaped by gravity, Earth’s rotation and the deformation of the solid Earth. Scientists call the resulting pattern a sea-level “fingerprint,” and it helps determine how much different coasts experience. A note before going further: We are not climate scientists, geophysicists, or coastal planners. This is a reading of published research, not a forecast for any particular shoreline. The scenarios here are model results about hypothetical ice loss, not predictions of what local sea level will do next decade. Why the nearest coast gains the least The strange part comes down to mass. An ice sheet is enormous, and mass attracts mass. A body of ice the size of West Antarctica pulls the surrounding ocean toward it, heaping water into a broad bulge around its edges. Take the ice away and you remove some of that pull. The water that was being held close spreads outward, so sea level near the former ice sheet drops. As Mark Tamisiea of the National Oceanography Centre put it, “The physics behind understanding these fingerprints is very well understood. It’s...

5,869 major moulins were located across the Greenland Ice Sheet for the abnormally warm summer of 2019 River-fed moulins account for 88.5% of all observed moulins, whereas lake-draining moulins a...