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Camp Century Community Photo Archive

I’ve enjoyed the great privilege of being involved with the Camp Century Climate Monitoring Program for several years. The scientific reports that we have delivered included surveying the sub-surface debris field, projecting future snowfall and surface melt, and surveying ice flow at the site. I’ve met tonnes people who are interested in Camp Century: researchers […]

Shifting Ice-Sheet Catchments

Greenland’s Jakobshavn Glacier (locally known as Sermeq Kujalleq) is one of the fastest-moving glaciers in the world and a major contributor to sea-level rise. We have a new study looking at the ice-sheet area, or catchment, that Jakobshavn drains. One of the approaches for assessing the mass balance, or health, of Jakobshavn is the input-output […]

Future of East Rongbuk Glacier

We have a new study out that looks at the fate of East Rongbuk Glacier under the current range of IPCC Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs). East Rongbuk Glacier is located on the north slope of Mount Everest, also called Chomolungma, where the climate is very cold and dry. The relatively little snowfall at East Rongbuk […]

Geothermal Influence on Basal Ice Temperatures

We have a new open-access study out in the current volume of The Cryosphere that looks at geothermal heat flow beneath the Greenland Ice Sheet. Geothermal heat flow is an important boundary condition for ice flow models because it influences the temperature of the ice-bed interface, which in turn influences how easily ice can deform […]

Bedrock Uplift from Greenland’s Peripheral Glaciers

We have a new article in the current issue of Geophysical Research Letters that looks at the influence of Greenland’s peripheral glaciers on vertical bedrock motion. Greenland’s bedrock is currently uplifting, due to both slow mantle-deformation processes associated with ice loss at the end of the Last Glacial Period, and fast elastic processes associated with […]

Melting ice reveals two-million-year old peat

This week, in an open-access Boreas article, we describe a new Early Pleistocene peat deposit in Northwest Greenland. We discovered the deposit quite accidentally during fieldwork near Thule Air Base in September 2019. That year, there was extreme melt in North Greenland, which removed the seasonal snowpack as far as the eye. Anders Bjørk […]

Greenland Ice Sheet mass loss from combined CryoSat-2 and ICESat-2 altimetry

We have a new open-access study out in the current volume of Journal of Geophysical Research that brings together both radar and laser altimetry measurements to assess the mass balance of the Greenland Ice Sheet between 2011 and 2020. Our assessment shows that the ice sheet lost approximately 498 Gt of ice volume, corresponding to […]

Greenland Bedrock Uplift and Iceberg Discharge

We have a new open-access study linking bedrock uplift and iceberg discharge at three major Greenland outlet glaciers in the last issue of Geophysical Research Letters. We look at recent changes in observed uplift rates and ice discharges at Jakobshavn, Kangerlussuaq and Helheim Glaciers. The idea of the study was to explore what we thought […]

Rainfall on the Greenland Ice Sheet

We have a new open-access study in the current issue of Geophysical Research Letters that looks at rainfall over the Greenland Ice Sheet. In many places around the globe, rainfall is a big player in the water budget. But on the ice sheet, rainfall has traditionally been a small player in ice-sheet mass balance. In […]

Instability of the North Water Polynya

We have a new study in the current issue of Nature Communications. It looks at the stability of the North Open Water polynya over the past five millennia. The North Open Water – or ‘Pikialasorsuaq’ in Greenlandic – is a portion of northern Baffin Bay that is kept sea ice free year-round by atmospheric and […]