An iceberg the size of Luxembourg knocked loose from the Antarctic continent earlier this month could disrupt the ocean currents driving weather patterns around the globe, researchers said Thursday. While the impact would not be felt for decades or longer, a slowdown in the production of colder, dense water could result in less temperate winters [...]

A new report of ice shelf changes along the southern, colder part of the Antarctic Peninsula reveal some dramatic losses of ice over the last 63 years that the researchers attribute to global warming. The report by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) compiles a wide variety of maps, aerial photos and satellite imagery to create [...]

Depicting a cause-and-effect scenario that spans thousands of miles, a scientist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego and his collaborators discovered that ocean waves originating along the Pacific coasts of North and South America impact Antarctic ice shelves and could play a role in their catastrophic collapse. Peter Bromirski of Scripps Oceanography [...]

Foundation Comment: If you do not wish to leave a personal comment on this News Posting, why not share it via your Twitter / FaceBook / MySpace or other media sites – you never know someone in your sphere of influence may just NEED to know about this featured release – Click the SHARE THIS [...]

A new study examines how ice sheets, such as the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, could become unstable as the world warms. The team from Oxford University and Cambridge University developed a model to explore how changes in the ‘grounding line’ — where an ice sheet floats free from its base of rock or sediment — [...]

The IPCC’s 2007 report missed out the melting of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets which would be the key drivers in dramatic sea level rises. The reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are balanced and comprehensive documents summarizing the impact of global warming on the planet. But they are not [...]

3 time-lapsed photos show the incredible disintegration of the Filchner ice shelf in Antarctica. Within a 24-hour space, an area of sea ice larger than the state of Rhode Island broke away from the Ronne-Filchner Ice Shelf and shattered into many smaller pieces. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua and Terra satellites [...]

A Special Feature of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences presents the latest scientific insights on so-called tipping elements in the planetary environment. These elements have been identified as the most vulnerable large-scale components of the Earth System that may be profoundly altered by human interference. If one or more of those components [...]

Recent observations of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet document rapid changes in the mass balance of its component glaciers. These observations raise the question of whether changing climatic conditions have triggered a dynamical instability in the ice-sheet–ice-shelf system. The dynamics of marine ice sheets are sensitive to grounding-line position and variation, characteristics that are poorly [...]

About 4.5 million years ago, during the early Pliocene period (3 to 5 million years ago), temperatures on Earth were some 3 to 4 degrees C (5.4 to 7.2 degrees F.) higher in the tropics, and perhaps 10 degrees C (18 degrees F.) warmer near the poles. To get that much warming, current climate models [...]