Using a 25-year record of satellite observations over the Getz region in West Antarctica, scientists have discovered that the pace at which glaciers flow towards the ocean is accelerating. This new research, which includes data from the Copernicus Sentinel-1 mission and ESA’s CryoSat mission, will help determine if these glaciers could collapse in the next …
A research team – the first to carry out a survey of global ice loss using satellite data – has discovered that the rate at which ice is disappearing across the planet is speeding up. The findings also reveal that 28 trillion tonnes of ice was lost between 1994 and 2017 – equivalent to a …
Hidden from view by ice kilometres thick, there is a vast network of lakes and streams at the base of the Antarctic ice sheet. This subsurface meltwater affects the speed with which the ice sheet flows towards the ocean. Using a decade of altimetry data from ESA’s CryoSat satellite, scientists have made an unexpected discovery …
The polar regions have experienced the most rapid rates of warming in recent years. Expected consequences due to this warming include the loss of sea ice, threats to wildlife, increased emissions and extreme weather. In response to this, ESA and the European Commission have come together to organise the first-ever European Polar Science Week dedicated …
This event will be held online. The overall objective of the European Polar Science Week is to bring together the European Polar science community, and reinforce European cooperation for Polar Science. More specifically, the Polar Science Week will aim to: Identifying major Polar scientific challenges, observation gaps and research needs for the coming years ; Define major …
On 19 August 2020, the world’s largest and longest polar research expedition – known as MOSAiC – reached the North Pole after making an unplanned detour owing to lighter-than-usual sea ice conditions. The expedition is now entering its final stage, during which researchers will study the last piece of the Arctic puzzle: the growth of …
A recent report confirms that ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, whose mass-loss rates have been rapidly increasing, are matching the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s worst-case sea-level rise scenarios. Read the full story.
The IPCC Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in Changing Climate (2019) includes “permafrost carbon and greenhouse gas emissions” as one of the cases characterised by deep uncertainty. The report states that even if there is a very high confidence that “permafrost temperatures have increased to record high levels including the recent increase by …
The CryoTEMPO-EOLIS (Elevation Over Land Ice from Swath) product, now operationally available at on the CryoSat Dissemination Server, exploits CryoSat’s SARIn mode and the novel Swath processing technique to deliver increased spatial and temporal coverage of time-dependent elevation over land ice, a critical metric for tracking ice mass trends. This is the outcome of a …
According to IMBIE (Ice Sheet Mass Balance Inter-comparison Exercise) most recent analyses, Greenland and Antarctica lost 6.4 trillion tonnes of ice between 1992 and 2017 – pushing global sea levels up by 17.8 millimetres, on track with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s worst-case climate warming scenario. Read the full story and Nature scientific articles …
