Snow On Ice
PI(s):
Snow on Ice
To measure algal blooms across large regions of the Greenland ice, and understand their effects on melting over time, scientists are turning to space.
greenland
Centers, Projects & Initiatives
Researchers
| Name | Title | Fields of interest | |
|---|---|---|---|
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Laura Stevens | Postdoctoral Research Fellow | Glaciology, Geophysics, Physical processes driving ice-sheet flow. |
 |
Indrani Das | Lamont Associate Research Professor | Mass balance of Antarctica and Greenland ice sheets, and mountain glaciers deep ice processes, ice-ocean interaction, basal melt of ice shelves, grounding line processes, Climate change and sea level rise. Airborne laser altimetry and ice penetrating radar, satellite remote sensing, surface energy and mass balance models, ice surface hydrology, dust and aerosols. |
News items
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October 15, 2020
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October 14, 2020
He’s working to make the geosciences an area where everyone can thrive.
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September 22, 2020
In this episode, Kevin Krajick explores Marco Tedesco’s obsession with the cryosphere—the part of earth that consists of frozen water.
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August 11, 2020
In a new book, glaciologist Marco Tedesco takes the reader on a personal journey through his sometimes dangerous work.
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July 16, 2020
GreenDrill promises to reveal the ice sheet’s past in unprecedented detail and enable more accurate predictions of how it may add to rising seas in the 21st century.
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April 30, 2020
In a new study, researchers have proposed a mechanism for how mega-canyons under northern Greenland’s ice sheet formed: from a series of catastrophic outburst floods that suddenly and repeatedly drained lakes of melting ice-sheet water.
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April 15, 2020
Study identifies unprecedented atmospheric conditions behind devastating summer; suggests climate models may greatly underestimate future melting.
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February 05, 2020
While much of the world is planning for flooding and inundation from changes in sea level, Greenland is facing a much different future.
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October 14, 2019
Using drones, laser scanners, and high-resolution models, researchers hope to find out more about the processes driving rapid melting in this region.
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March 07, 2019
Rainy weather is becoming increasingly common over parts of the Greenland ice sheet, triggering sudden melting events that are eating at the ice and priming the surface for more widespread future melting, says a new study.
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October 01, 2018
A small team of scientists ventures out onto the Greenland ice sheet to study the forces large and small that are accelerating the melting of the world’s second-largest ice mass.
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July 25, 2018
For this early part of the season the goal is to tease apart a record of historic precipitation and temperature for this region using isotopes from leaf waxes collected in the lake sediments.
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July 12, 2018
Snow on Ice is launching into the field with two teams of scientists this summer. The first group, an ‘advance team’ of six women, will focus on lakes where meltwater has collected on the southwestern flank of Greenland bedrock.
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April 24, 2018
Polar scientists Marco Tedesco and Robin Bell provide a primer on how climate change will impact our coastlines.
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April 23, 2018
For decades, scientists believed that the Greenland Ice Sheet is relatively stable compared with the vulnerable West Antarctic Ice Sheet. Two Lamont scientists questioned this assumption about Greenland’s ice and wanted to take a much closer look.
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July 05, 2017
Iron particles catching a ride on glacial meltwater washed out to sea are likely fueling a recently discovered summer algal bloom off the southern coast of Greenland, according to a new study.
Microalgae, also known as phytoplankton, are plant-like marine microorganisms that form the base of the food web in many parts of the ocean. “Phytoplankton serve as food for all of the fish and animals that live there. Everything that eats is eating them ultimately,” said Kevin Arrigo, a biological oceanographer at Stanford University and lead author of the study.
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January 05, 2017
When summer temperatures rise in Greenland and the melt season begins, water pools on the surface, and sometimes disappears down holes in the ice. That water may eventually reach bedrock, creating a slipperier, faster slide for glaciers. But where does it go once it gets there, and what happens to it in the winter? A new study helps answer these questions.
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December 13, 2016
The Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet, and scientists are seeing the effects across ice and ecosystems. The average annual air temperature over Arctic land is now 3.5°C (6.5°F) warmer than it was 1900, Greenland is experiencing longer melting seasons, and this year’s spring snow cover extent set a record low in the North American Arctic, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s newly released 2016 Arctic Report Card.
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December 07, 2016
Scientists have found evidence in a chunk of bedrock drilled from nearly two miles below the summit of the Greenland Ice Sheet that the ice nearly disappeared for an extended time in the last million years or so. The finding casts doubt on assumptions that Greenland has been relatively stable during the recent geological past, and implies that global warming could tip it into decline more precipitously than previously thought. Such a decline could cause rapid sea-level rise. The findings appear this week in the leading journal Nature.
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June 09, 2016
Following record-high temperatures and melting records in northwest Greenland in summer 2015, a new study provides the first evidence linking melting in Greenland to the anticipated effects of a phenomenon known as Artic amplification.
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March 03, 2016
Greenland's snowy surface has been getting darker over the past two decades, absorbing more heat from the sun and increasing snow melt, a new study of satellite data shows. That trend is likely to continue, with the surface's reflectivity, or albedo, decreasing by as much as 10 percent by the end of the century, the study says.
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October 13, 2015
Nicolás Young was just named a winner of a 2015 Blavatnik Award for his work measuring ice sheets in changing climates of the past and their contribution to sea level rise. His new projects are taking glacier tracking to the next level.
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June 12, 2014Beneath the barren whiteness of Greenland, a mysterious world has popped into view. Using ice-penetrating radar, researchers have discovered ragged blocks of ice as tall as city skyscrapers and as wide as the island of Manhattan at the very bottom of the ice sheet, apparently formed as water beneath the ice refreezes and warps the surrounding ice upwards.The newly revealed forms may help scientists understand more about how ice sheets behave and how they will respondto a warming climate. The results are published in the latest issue of Nature Geoscience.
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June 08, 2006
The end of the recurring, 100,000-year glacial cycles is one of the most prominent and readily identifiable features in records of the Earth's recent climate history. Yet one of the most puzzling questions in climate science has been why different parts of the world, most notably Greenland, appear to have warmed at different times and at different rates after the end of the last Ice Age.
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March 23, 2006
Seismologists at Columbia University and Harvard University have found a new indicator that the Earth is warming: "glacial earthquakes" caused when the rivers of ice lurch unexpectedly and produce temblors as strong as magnitude 5.1 on the moment-magnitude scale, which is similar to the Richter scale. Glacial earthquakes in Greenland, the researchers found, are most common in July and August, and have more than doubled in number since 2002.
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March 14, 2006
The retreat of a massive ice sheet that once covered much of northern Europe has been described for the first time, and researchers believe it may provide a sneak preview of how present-day ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica will act in the face of global warming.
