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...

This summer, in remote Greenland, a suite of high-tech gadgets and robots will be deployed, James Bond–like, at the treacherous points where glaciers meet the sea. Their mission: Study melting ice in never-before-seen detail. The data from the expedition, funded by the British government’s secretive new inventions agency, will feed into the latest climate models. The idea is to forecast when the ice melt will tip climate-regulating ocean currents into a shutdown, and try to develop an early warning system that would let humanity know when glaciers are changing in an alarming way. The voyage, launching on July 16, “addresses a foundational data deficit in one of the most consequential parts of the climate system,” says sea ice acoustics expert Hari Vishnu of the National University of Singapore, who isn’t involved in the work. “We cannot model what we cannot observe.” Until recently, such a mission would have been impossible. Where Greenland’s glaciers meet turbulent waters, “ice cliffs tower above the ocean surface — sometimes 30 meters high, sometimes a hundred — fracturing, collapsing and launching house-sized icebergs into the fjord with little warning,” says oceanographer Jonathan Nash of Oregon State University in Corvallis. Nash is a member of the...

For decades, geologists believed a giant ice sheet took hundreds of thousands of years to cross the Baltic Sea and reach western Europe. The timeline seemed well established, built on pollen records and sediment correlations that had shaped the field since the 1960s. A new study has pushed that first trans-Baltic advance back by more than a million years. The researchers reached the revised date using a dating technique that had never before been applied to the deposit. Gravel changed it all The research team was led by Kaleb Wagner, a geoscientist at the GFÚ Institute of Geophysics, Czech Academy of Sciences (IG CAS). They set out to directly date the oldest known glacial deposit in northwestern Europe. That deposit is a layer of coarse, boulder-studded gravel called the Hattem Bed Complex, buried beneath farmland in the northeastern Netherlands. For decades it was assumed to be roughly 1.1 million years old, an estimate based on its position beneath a younger, better-dated unit rather than direct measurement. Wagner’s team retrieved archived drill cores and applied cosmogenic burial dating, which tracks two radioactive elements, aluminum-26 and beryllium-10. Both form in quartz when sediment sits near the surface and gets hit by cosmic...

Morning Report An Antarctic sediment sample dating back millions of years shows evidence that a major ice sheet partially or totally collapsed during a previous warm period. The sediment core was retrieved by a New Zealand-led research team from beneath half a kilometre of ice, during a record-breaking mission in a remote part of Antarctica. It will now help answer the question of when, and how drastically, the West Antarctic ice sheet might melt as the climate keeps warming - releasing up to five metres of sea level rise as it goes. Previously, the largest samples retrieved from that deep beneath an Antarctic ice sheet were only about 10 metres in length. Camping on the ice, 1100 kilometres from the nearest permanent base, the team used a huge drill rig to extract a 228-metre sample of mud and rock, three metres at a time. It dates back an estimated 23 million years - giving climate researchers an enormous geological record to examine. "It still feels a little bit unreal, to be honest," expedition co-chief scientist Molly Patterson said. "I can't imagine anything else in my professional life scaling that experience up." Collecting the sample was crucial to confirming models of...

Antarctica may look like a vast, frozen desert from above, but beneath its kilometres-thick ice sheet lies a landscape that scientists are still trying to understand. Now, researchers have uncovered a gigantic fan-shaped geological structure buried deep beneath East Antarctica, a discovery that could help explain how parts of the continent respond to climate change. The newly identified formation sits hidden under the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, one of the largest masses of ice on Earth. In some areas, the ice covering it is more than three kilometres thick, keeping the ancient landscape completely out of sight. The international research team has named the feature the East Antarctic Fan-shaped Basin Province. Far from being a single basin, the structure is made up of an intricate network of interconnected subglacial basins. It includes several well-known hidden features beneath Antarctica, such as the Wilkes Basin, Aurora Basin and the basin that contains Lake Vostok, the largest known subglacial lake on the planet. The study was led by Dr Egidio Armadillo from the University of Genoa with support from the Italian National Antarctic Research Program. Researchers from several institutions, including Durham University, also contributed to the work. According to the scientists, the enormous...

A mysterious geological structure that resembles a human hand with outstretched fingers has been revealed beneath East Antarctica. The discovery shows the frozen continent still hides many geological ...

The research, led by scientists at the IBS Center for Climate Physics (ICCP) at Pusan National University in South Korea, offers fresh insight into how massive ice sheets react to long term climate changes and what that could mean for future sea level rise. Today, Antarctica contains the largest mass of ice on the planet and plays a major role in regulating global sea levels. Around one million years ago, Earth experienced a major climate transition in which ice ages became longer, colder, and more intense. Scientists refer to this period as the Mid-Pleistocene Transition. Although researchers have known about this shift for decades, exactly how Antarctica's ice sheet responded has remained uncertain. Simulating 3 Million Years of Climate History One of the biggest obstacles has been the lack of realistic long term climate records needed to test ice sheet behavior under ancient conditions. To solve this problem, the team used an advanced paleoclimate simulation recently developed at the ICCP that reconstructs global climate patterns over the past 3 million years. The simulation provided detailed temperature and precipitation data, which researchers fed into the Penn State University ice-sheet-ice-shelf model. That model tracks changes in ice sheet movement, thickness, temperature, and...

- Add missing grassland_dunes and snowy_grassland_under biomes. - Rename glacier biome to icesheet to adhere to default game. - Increase fuel burn time for Charcoal from 10 to 30. Statistics: Posted by TenPlus1 — Mon May 25, 2026 07:01 * * *