What if you could measure a glacier in such detail that you could visualize its surface in 3D? And what if you could compare that view with data from one, two, even 20 years ago? NASA airborne campaigns like Operation IceBridge have been measuring Greenland and Antarctica’s glaciers and ice sheets with a range of…
Neil deGrasse Tyson visualized CO2 in the air, in this 2014 COSMOS clip.
The mass of the Greenland ice sheet has rapidly declined in the last several years due to surface melting and iceberg calving. Research based on observations from the NASA/German Aerospace Center’s twin Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites indicates that between 2002 and 2016, Greenland shed approximately 280 gigatons of ice per year, causing…
The mass of the Antarctic ice sheet has changed over the last several years. Research based on observations from NASA’s twin NASA/German Aerospace Center’s twin Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites indicates that between 2002 and 2016, Antarctica shed approximately 125 gigatons of ice per year, causing global sea level to rise by 0.35…
Visualisation of sea level rise of 10 feet (3 meters), based on the risk zone map, provided by Climate Central. Current estimates about future sea level rise, consider up to 10 feet already locked in, due to the greenhouse gas emissions we have emitted so far. How fast this will happen is not certain yet.…
07/27/2016 – Global-mean temperatures are breaking one record after the other since instrumental observations began. Driven by burning of fossil fuels and deforestation, carbon dioxide concentrations have also soared to unprecedented levels. In fact, today’s CO2 concentrations are higher than they have ever been over the last 800 thousand years. Scientists from the Potsdam Institute…
2016 Arctic sea ice wintertime extent hits another record low By Maria-Jose Viñas, NASA’s Earth Science News Team Excerpt Arctic sea ice appears to have reached a record low wintertime maximum extent for the second year in a row, according to scientists at the NASA-supported National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) and NASA.…
NASA: Zachariæ Isstrøm has become the latest Greenland glacier to undergo rapid changes in a warming world. Research published November 2015 in Science found that Zachariæ Isstrøm broke loose from a stable position in 2012 and entered a phase of accelerated retreat. The consequences will be felt for decades to come. The reason? Zachariæ Isstrøm is…
GRACE consists of twin co-orbiting satellites that fly in a near polar orbit separated by a distance of 220 km. GRACE precisely measures the distance between the two spacecraft in order to make detailed measurements of the Earth’s gravitational field. Since its launch in 2002, GRACE has provided a continuous record of changes in the…
The view of Earth from orbit was the focus of this What’s New in Aerospace? presentation televised on NASA Television from the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington. The program featured Piers Sellers, a climate scientist and former NASA astronaut, taking viewers on a tour of our home planet as never seen before.…
ESA posted an update on Antarctic ice loss on 22 May 2015. Above animation shows how warm ocean water penetrates the glacier grounding line through basalt melt, threatening speed up of glaciers, discharged into the ocean. A recent acceleration in ice loss in a previously stable region of Antarctica has been detected by ESA’s ice mission. The…
Peering into the thousands of frozen layers inside Greenland’s ice sheet is like looking back in time. Each layer provides a record of not only snowfall and melting events, but what the Earth’s climate was like at the dawn of civilization, or during the last ice age, or during an ancient period of warmth similar…
Past sea level rise is not captured by models yet, in particular the response from ice sheets in Antarctica due to global warming. Projections therefore can often be regarded to potentially underestimate future sea level rise. For example, Overpeck et al. (2006), and Hansen (2007) suggest possibilities which could eventually lead to a nonlinear response…
Published on Dec 10, 2014: Climate science explained in 60 seconds by the Royal Society and the US National Academy of Sciences. During the last 200 years, human activities such as the burning of fossil fuels have increased concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere by 40%. If unchecked, continuing emissions will warm up the planet…
