Cryospheric science articles within Nature Geoscience

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  • News & Views |

    Greenland's ice sheet does not look like an alpine glacier. However, it behaves like one in the way its meltwater lubricates basal motion, suggesting that projections of sea-level change will require unified knowledge of basal processes in glaciers and ice sheets.

    • Byron R. Parizek

  • Letter |

    Vertical motions of the rocky margins of Greenland and Antarctica respond to mass changes of their respective ice sheets, but these motions can be obscured by ancient episodes of glacial advance or retreat. An analysis of the acceleration of vertical motion indicates that accelerated ice loss in western Greenland started in the late 1990s.

    • Yan Jiang
    • , Timothy H. Dixon
    •  & Shimon Wdowinski

  • Letter |

    Ice clouds in the tropical tropopause layer have a key role in dehydrating air that is entering the stratosphere. Cloud-chamber measurements suggest that their high humidity can be explained if heterogeneous ice nucleation on glassy aerosols is a significant nucleation mechanism in this region.

    • Benjamin J. Murray
    • , Theodore W. Wilson
    •  & Bernd Kärcher

  • Backstory |

    Fiamma Straneo and colleagues travelled to the heart of a glacial fjord in East Greenland to determine the causes of glacial retreat.

  • News & Views |

    Greenland is losing ice through glaciers that flow into deep fjords. New observations highlight the important fjord processes that supply warm ocean waters to the melting glaciers, and thereby affect Greenland's contribution to sea-level rise.

    • Paul Holland

  • Letter |

    Widespread glacier acceleration has been observed in Greenland in the past few years. Oceanographic observations taken in summer 2008 show that ocean waters melted a substantial fraction of ice along the calving fronts of three West Greenland glaciers, indicating that submarine melting has a profound influence on grounding-line stability.

    • Eric Rignot
    • , Michele Koppes
    •  & Isabella Velicogna

  • Letter |

    The recent rapid increase in mass loss from the Greenland ice sheet is primarily attributed to an acceleration of outlet glaciers. Oceanographic data obtained in summer 2008 show that subtropical waters that reside year-round in the shelf ocean off Greenland continuously enter a large glacial fjord in East Greenland and contribute to melting at the glacier terminus.

    • Fiammetta Straneo
    • , Gordon S. Hamilton
    •  & Aqqalu Rosing-Asvid

  • Article |

    The southwest corner of Western Australia has been subject to a serious drought in recent decades, whose ultimate cause remains unclear. A comparison of precipitation records in the area of drought and an ice core from East Antarctica reveal a significant inverse correlation between precipitation in the two locations, and suggest that the current drought may be highly unusual compared with the past 750 years of variability.

    • Tas D. van Ommen
    •  & Vin Morgan

  • Letter |

    Over the past 50 years, retreating glaciers and ice caps have contributed 0.5 mm yr−1 to sea-level rise, and one third of this contribution is believed to come from ice masses bordering the Gulf of Alaska. A combination of a comprehensive glacier inventory with high-resolution elevation data indicates that the ice loss from Alaskan glaciers is 34% less than previously thought.

    • E. Berthier
    • , E. Schiefer
    •  & F. Rémy

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