Glaciologist Martin Truffer changed his team’s plan the other day. He and a crew of other scientists were about to travel to Malaspina Glacier — near the elbow of Alaska where Southeast Alaska hinges onto the mainland — but the glacier has wrecked his campsite. “Mark Fahenstock [another team member] looked at velocities of […]
(Anchorage) — The threat of a large and potentially dangerous tsunami is looming in Prince William Sound, where an increasingly likely landslide could generate a wave with devastating effects on fishermen and recreationalists using the area, the state’s top geologist said. Steve Masterman, director of the Division of Geological and Geophysical Surveys (DGGS) said […]
For the 20th straight year, in December 2019 I carried a notebook into the halls of the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union. Most of those years the conference was in San Francisco (as it was this year). Back in 1999, when one billion fewer people lived on Earth, the 5,000 scientists who […]
A University of Alaska Fairbanks study looking at the physics of tidewater glaciers has yielded new insights into what drives their retreat-and-advance cycles and the role that climate plays in these cycles. Lead author and UAF geophysics doctoral student Douglas Brinkerhoff said the study in Nature Communications reveals that shifting sediments drive the cycles among […]
The thawing and erosion of Arctic permafrost coasts has dramatically increased in the past years and the sea is now consuming more than 20 meters of land per year at some locations. The earth masses removed in this process increasingly blur the shallow water areas and release nutrients and pollutants. Yet, the consequences of these […]
Pine Island Glacier — about the size of Florida and one of the largest ice streams in Antarctica — has been thinning and retreating at an alarming rate since 1992, when satellite images first began to document the change. New evidence suggests that the thinning and retreat of Pine Island Glacier was underway as early […]
A new book from the GLIMS (Global Land Ice Measurements from Space) initiative, an international collaboration including the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado Boulder, provides the most comprehensive report to date on global glacier changes. The book, Global Land Ice Measurements from Space, presents an overview and detailed assessment […]