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 [...]

Scientists who predicted a few years ago that Arctic summers could be ice-free by 2013 now say summer sea ice will probably be gone in this decade. The original prediction, made in 2007, gained Wieslaw Maslowski’s team a deal of criticism from some of their peers. Now they are working with a new computer model [...]

While the discussions continue about climate change, this is a sobering presentation as to the outcome for the Arctic and some of its inhabitants. var showHover=false;

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 [...]

Pine Island Glacier is a giant, an outlet glacier draining about 160,000 km2 of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. It is the focus of intense current concern because the area near its grounding line, where it feeds a floating ice shelf, has exhibited rapidly increasing rates of thinning and concurrent retreat of the grounding line. [...]

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. [...]

Scientists warn that temperature rise of between 2C and 7C would cause ice to melt, resulting in 23ft rise in sea level The entire ice mass of Greenland will disappear from the world map if temperatures rise by as little as 2C, with severe consequences for the rest of the world, a panel of scientists [...]