With a gargantuan crack slowly splitting it apart, Antarctica‘s fastest-melting glacier is about to lose a chunk of ice larger than all of New York City, scientists say. (Also see “Manhattan-Size Ice Island Cracks in Half.”) The crevasse stretches 19 miles (30 kilometers) long and up to 260 feet (80 meters) wide, as shown in [...]

The first-ever map of how Antarctica’s ice is moving across that continent has been created by researchers at the University of California, Irvine. The map, along with an associated animation (below) developed by NASA, reveals that ice is flowing fastest in coastal ice shelves and their tributaries, shown in this illustration in bright purple and [...]

Judging by the weather, the world seems to have flipped upside down. For two winters running, an Arctic chill has descended on Europe, burying that continent in snow and ice. Last year in the United States, historic blizzards afflicted the mid-Atlantic region. This winter the Deep South has endured unusual snowstorms and severe cold, and [...]

Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute and Author of Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization We are entering a new era, one of rapid and often unpredictable climate change. In fact, the new climate norm is change. The 25 warmest years on record have come since 1980. And the 10 warmest years since [...]

November 2, 2010 – From Yale Forum on Climate Change & the Media. Another sign from the research community that Earth’s temperature is rising: The volume of fresh water flowing down the world’s rivers has increased markedly since 1994, new satellite data confirms. The study (also see here) led by the University of California, Irvine, [...]

Melt water flowing through ice sheets via crevasses, fractures and large drains called moulins can carry warmth into ice sheet interiors, greatly accelerating the thermal response of an ice sheet to climate change, according to a new study involving the University of Colorado at Boulder. The new study showed ice sheets like the Greenland Ice [...]

The largest chunk of ice in the Northern Hemisphere is on the move – at a four-hundredths-of-a-kilometer an hour clip. Satellite imagery from the European Space Agency shows that a massive iceberg that calved from Greenland’s Petermann Glacier on August 4 has cruised into the Nares Strait, putting 28 kilometers between it and its source. [...]

Greenhouse Neutral Foundation comment – I have long admired James Hansen as a person who cares for the future of all that we share our fragile planet with. The answers to all of the significant challenges we face in the imminent future is in OUR hands. We need to accept this moral responsibility. The following [...]

EVERYONE knows how much hotter it feels to wear a black T-shirt, rather than a white one, on a warm day. In the same way, the melting of sea ice in the Arctic, revealing the dark water below, has been shown by Australian scientists to be the main cause of unusually rapid warming at the [...]

From John Cook Sceptical Science I’m talking at the University of Queensland next week so I thought I might use Skeptical Science to test-drive a new visual metaphor. Sometimes in the climate debate, we get a bit lost in the data and statistical analysis, forgetting the sheer scale of the impact we’re having on our [...]