All posts tagged: glaciers

First-ever map documents 33 glacial lakes hidden under the Canadian Arctic

First-ever map documents 33 glacial lakes hidden under the Canadian Arctic

Published by Jenni Sidey

Water hidden beneath Arctic glaciers is moving far more than scientists realized. Now there is a map to prove it. Researchers have identified 37 active subglacial lakes across the Canadian Arctic, including 33 bodies of water that had not been documented before. The lakes sit beneath or partly beneath glaciers. Furthermore, some of them drain or refill so quickly that the ice above them can rise or fall by more than 100 meters in less than a year. The work offers the first decadal inventory of active subglacial lakes in the region. It also adds a new layer to the picture of Arctic ice loss in one of the world’s fastest-changing glacier zones. “Now we can further characterize the way the Arctic environment is changing, which can be an indication of climate change impacts on the region,” said Dr. Wesley Van Wychen, a professor in the Faculty of Environment at the University of Waterloo. “Changes in water storage are important in terms of understanding how the speed of glaciers may change. By measuring the draining …

How a Melting Glacier in Antarctica Could Affect Tens of Millions Around the Globe

How a Melting Glacier in Antarctica Could Affect Tens of Millions Around the Globe

Published by Sam Flores

Scientists spent the first weeks of the year on an expedition to Antarctica to study Thwaites Glacier, which is melting at an alarming rate. If it breaks apart entirely, it could push up global sea levels by two feet over the course of several decades, affecting tens of millions worldwide, according to a New York Times analysis. The maps below show some of the coastal cities at risk and populated, low-lying areas that could be threatened if the glacier were to collapse today. Kolkata, India 1.7 million Note: Areas below high tide may be protected by seawalls, levees or other coastal defenses. Sources: Climate Central; Worldpop; Jerry Mitrovica, Harvard University. These are just the minimum effects that Thwaites’s disintegration would be likely to have on the world’s coastlines. As the glacier breaks apart, global warming will raise sea levels even higher by melting the ice from Greenland and causing oceans to expand in volume. And Thwaites acts as a plug, holding back many of the Antarctic glaciers on land around it. If it collapses, they …

Alpine glacier holds history dating back to the Romans. And it’s melting—fast.

Alpine glacier holds history dating back to the Romans. And it’s melting—fast.

Published by Jenni Sidey

Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Deep inside the frozen Eastern Alps, the Weißseespitze ice cap (pronounced VICE-zay-shpitt-suh) sits at almost 11,482 feet (3,500 meters) above sea level. Overlooking the mountainous border between Austria and Italy, Weißseespitze is an alpine glacier. It formed as layers of snowfall gradually compacted into dense glacial ice, trapping airborne particles that hold important clues about Earth’s past atmosphere.  The oldest ice contained in Weißseespitze dates back roughly 6,000 years to the mid-Holocene, a warm period following the close of the last global ice age. Scientists say the ice cap is an extraordinary trove of data about pre-industrial human activity and environmental change. But rising global temperatures due to climate change are rapidly melting the glacier’s surface, forcing researchers to move quickly to capture the critical information frozen inside Weißseespitze.  Atmosphere frozen in time From 2019 to 2024, an international team of scientists embarked on a series of research expeditions at the dome-shaped ice cap, drilling down to the bedrock …

Sebastião Salgado’s stunning shots of the world’s icy regions

Sebastião Salgado’s stunning shots of the world’s icy regions

Published by skeptic

Sebastião Salgado’s photo of the South Sandwich Islands, taken in 2009 Sebastião Salgado Sebastião Salgado became famous for his portraits of humans struggling to survive in an unjust and violent world. He took astonishing photographs of the attempted assassination of US President Ronald Reagan, covered conflicts in Africa, the Balkans and the Middle East, and documented the lives of labourers and migrants in years-long, globe-spanning projects. But after photographing the Rwandan genocide, Salgado became depressed, retreating to his family farm in Brazil. Dismayed by the environmental destruction he found, he began restoring the Atlantic rainforest there, which eventually inspired him to return to photography. The Genesis project followed, to capture “what was pristine and hadn’t been destroyed” on the planet, as Selgado said in a 2024 interview, from the mountains of Alaska to the Indigenous peoples of the Amazon. These travels turned him into an environmentalist, Salgado said in another interview. Glaciers, published this month following Salgado’s death last year, collects 65 of the black-and-white shots of glaciers and other ice the photographer took for …

Humans, not Glaciers, Moved Rocks Used in Stonehenge’s Construction

Humans, not Glaciers, Moved Rocks Used in Stonehenge’s Construction

Published by José Betancourt

Researchers at Curtin University in Australia have presented evidence that humans, rather than glaciers, moved the rocks used in Stonehenge’s construction to England. Their findings were published January 21 in the journal Communications Earth and Environment. Located on Salisbury Plain in England, Stonehenge was built in stages by Neolithic and Bronze Age peoples between around 3000 BC and 1500 BC. It consists of an outer circle and inner horseshoe of sandstone trilithons with inner arcs of smaller bluestones. Related Articles Geological evidence has confirmed that the monument’s sandstone boulders came from the Marlborough Downs, 20 miles away, while the smaller dolomite bluestones were quarried in the Preseli Hills in southwest Wales, 180 miles to the northwest. The average sarsen (sandstone block) at Stonehenge weights 25 tons; the average bluestone ranges 2 to 5 tons, and the largest weighs 40 tons. Stonehenge’s Altar Stone, weighing six tons, is now thought to have originated in Scotland. Until this month, there were competing theories as to how the stones traveled such long distances, with some positing that humans …

Why is this infamous iceberg turning blue?

Why is this infamous iceberg turning blue?

Published by Jenni Sidey

Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Iceberg A-23A is looking a little blue these days. In late December 2025, NASA and NOAA’s Terra satellite spotted the massive iceberg covered with blue meltwater. A-23A is one of the largest and longest-lived bergs ever tracked by scientists, but is at risk of completely disintegrating as it drifts through warm Southern Atlantic waters. The satellite image of iceberg A-23A taken on December 26, 2025. Image: NASA. In 1986, the flat-topped iceberg broke away from Antarctica’s Filchner Ice Shelf. Back then, it was over 15,000 square miles—almost twice the size of the state of Rhode Island. Today, the United States National Ice Center estimates the iceberg’s area is around 456 square miles. While that is much smaller than its original size, it still makes it bigger than New York City. In July, August, and September of 2025 iceberg A-23A saw some sizable breakups as it moved into the Southern Hemisphere’s relatively warm summer conditions by December. The MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging …

Quiet cracking is destabilizing Antarctica’s Doomsday Glacier leading to irreversible collapse

Quiet cracking is destabilizing Antarctica’s Doomsday Glacier leading to irreversible collapse

Published by Jenni Sidey

Debangshu Banerjee, a recent graduate of the Centre for Earth Observation Sciences at the University of Manitoba, with Dr. Karen Alley of the same center and Dr. David Lilien of Indiana University Bloomington., and partner institutions have uncovered a clear pattern behind the slow unraveling of a critical Antarctic ice shelf. Their findings were published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Earth Surface and form part of the Thwaites Amundsen Regional Survey and Network, a core project within the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration, a major U.S.-U.K. research effort. The focus of the study is the Thwaites Eastern Ice Shelf, a floating extension of West Antarctica’s Thwaites Glacier. Thwaites holds enough ice to raise global sea levels by about 65 centimeters. Its rapid change has earned it the nickname “Doomsday Glacier,” yet the new research shows that its weakening follows an organized sequence rather than random collapse. Study area: Thwaites Eastern Ice Shelf (TEIS) and surroundings. TEIS, Thwaites Western Ice Tongue (TWIT), pinning points, shear margin between TEIS and the TWIT, and Thwaites Glacier are also …

Chile’s megadrought is dealing a severe and long-lasting blow to their glacier ecosystems

Chile’s megadrought is dealing a severe and long-lasting blow to their glacier ecosystems

Published by Jenni Sidey

The high mountains of central Chile look solid and eternal, but their ice is in trouble. For fifteen years, the country has endured a stubborn megadrought, and glaciers have quietly carried much of the burden. They have melted faster to keep rivers flowing and taps running. A new study warns that by the end of this century, that backup system may break when you most need it. An international team led by researchers in Austria, Switzerland and Chile set out a stark question: what if a drought as long and severe as today’s megadrought hits again near 2100? Their answer is blunt. The glaciers of the Southern Andes will be too worn down to cushion such a shock. Chile’s Long Thirst Chileans are used to periods of dryness. In the past, droughts came every five or six years and lasted one or two years. People could wait for rain to return. This time, relief never came. “Climate scientists only realized in 2015 that the unending drought in Chile was really a big thing,” says Francesca …

Alpine communities face uncertain future after 2025 glacier collapse

Alpine communities face uncertain future after 2025 glacier collapse

Published by skeptic

Blatten in Switzerland was buried by a landslide in May 2025 ALEXANDRE AGRUSTI/AFP via Getty Images In May, the village of Blatten in the Swiss Alps was destroyed when a huge chunk of a glacier collapsed, but thanks to careful monitoring, almost all of its residents were saved. The first sign of an impending disaster appeared on 14 May, when an official observer for Switzerland’s snow avalanche warning service reported a small rockfall above the village. These observers have other full-time jobs in the area, but are trained to keep an eye on the slopes. The service then took a look at images from a camera installed on the glacier above the village after snow avalanches in the 1990s. “In those photos, they could see changes on the ridge on the mountain,” says Mylène Jacquemart at ETH Zurich in Switzerland. “It just so happened that the camera was looking at it from a very useful angle.” That led to further investigations, which found that a major landslide was likely. On 18 and 19 May, 300 …

The world will soon be losing 3000 glaciers every year

The world will soon be losing 3000 glaciers every year

Published by skeptic

Meltwater runs through a glacier cave at the front of Morteratsch glacier in Switzerland Lander Van Tricht About 1000 glaciers are now being lost every year and this rate could climb to 3000 per year as soon as 2040, even if countries meet their targets to cut carbon emissions. At least 4000 glaciers have melted away in the past two decades. Lander Van Tricht at ETH Zurich in Switzerland and his colleagues used climate models to predict what will happen to the world’s 211,000 glaciers in the coming century under different global warming scenarios. Current climate goals put the world on track for 2.7°C of warming above pre-industrial temperatures this century. This would mean 79 per cent of the world’s glaciers will disappear by 2100. If humanity limits global warming to 2°C, however, 63 per cent of glaciers will disappear. “We’re going to lose many of our glaciers, but we have the ability to preserve a lot of them as well,” says David Rounce at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, who worked on the …