#climate-change — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #climate-change, aggregated by home.social.
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humidity, triple-digit temperatures expected to create dangerous conditions across southern california
humidity, triple-digit temperatures expected to create dangerous conditions across southern california https://www.cbsnews.com/losangeles/news/extreme-heat-humidity-dangerous-conditions-southern-california/ -
Given that the rich have jumped the shark on climate change, we can still find ways to mitigate the harm.
https://www.usgs.gov/programs/cmhrp/news/nature-based-horizontal-levees-reduce-flood-risk-san-francisco-bay #climatechange #environment #sustainability #nature #globalwarming #savetheplanet
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#CCCR2026 #Overshoot #AcceleratingWarming
Canada’s Changing Climate Report 2026
03 Sept. 2026"The warming and associated changes in climate in Canada are effectively irreversible."
#climate #ClimateScience #climatechange #ClimateEmergency #ClimateCrisis #ClimateBreakdown #ClimateDisruption #globalWarming #globalHeating #polycrisis
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#PaulBeckwith video lecture & literature review #Overshoot #AcceleratingWarming
Paul on the newly released #Canada #climatechange Report 2026
#climate #ClimateScience #ClimateEmergency #ClimateCrisis #ClimateBreakdown #ClimateDisruption #globalWarming #globalHeating #polycrisis
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Though the scale and mechanisms may vary, Japan is not immune to the risk of catastrophic mudslides hitting mountainous communities like the one that hit Nepal last month, experts say. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/environment/2026/09/09/climate-change/japan-avalanche-risk-nepal/?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=mastodon #environment #climatechange #climatechange #nepal #glaciers #floods #landslides #rain
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Israel’s Algae Crisis: Is ‘War Dust’ From Gaza Fueling the Crisis?
Experts from the Technion and Ben-Gurion University of the Negev have been racing in recent days to find…
#NewsBeep #News #BreakingNews #breakingnews #Climatechange #Environment&Nature #Israel #IsraelGazaWar #Israelwater #Science&technology
https://www.newsbeep.com/724951/ -
"The past summer has been the hottest in recorded British history, with temperatures hitting 38.1 C (100.6 F) and exceptionally dry conditions inflicting drought on much of the country. Many farmers have faced crisis as potatoes emerge from the soil stunted or spoiled, wheat and oat yields fall and cows produce less milk."
#climate #climatechange #climatecrisis #england
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/09/world/europe/england-climate-tea-cantaloupe.html?unlocked_article_code=1._1A.JliE.OgjjwlGr6aeq&smid=url-share -
A review of recent government progress (and obstruction) on pollution mitigation and climate crumpling (article is from early March 2026)...
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thousands of dte customers, many in oakland county, without power wednesday morning
thousands of dte customers, many in oakland county, without power wednesday morning https://www.cbsnews.com/detroit/news/thousands-of-dte-customers-many-in-oakland-county-without-power-wednesday-morning/ -
"In this special release of "Stories from the Stellar" we follow the tale of Leander & the pivotal Billionaire Strike that changed the world of The Stellar in 2029. Trigger Warning: Allusion to gendered violence. It's not necessarily a trigger but my 'cockney accent' also requires warning."
#lunarpunk #solarpunk #ttrpg #homeless #houseless #homelessness #billionaires #climatechange #climatecrisis #environment #podcast #story #stories #fiction #clifi #political #fiction
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The Anthropocene was rejected as a geological epoch – but the idea is still changing how we see the world https://theconversation.com/the-anthropocene-was-rejected-as-a-geological-epoch-but-the-idea-is-still-changing-how-we-see-the-world-291329?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon #ClimateChange
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Nuclear Energy's Role in Combating Climate Change
📰 Original title: Climate change is exposing nuclear power’s reliability problem
🤖 IA: It's not clickbait ✅
👥 Users: It's not clickbait ✅#climatechange #energianuclear #cambioclimatico #energiarenovable
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Our beautiful planters keep downtown Lewistown looking sharp, throughout the warmer months. #pennsylvaniagardens #pennsylvaniagardener #globalwarming #climatechange #motherearth #environmentalconcern #environmentalconcerns #pollution #stoppollution #industrialproblems #SaveMotherEarth #pennsylvaniagardening #fecund #peony #peonies #canna #cannas #cannalily #cannalilies #flowering #flower #flowers #bloom #blooms #blooming #yucca #yuccas #sweetpotatovine #sweetpotatovines
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RAPPLER | Philippine & World News | Investigative Journalism | Data | Civic Engagement | Public Interest [Unofficial] @[email protected] ·P6.2 billion slated for fertilizer, fuel aid to ease El Niño impact
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A jumble of broken ice, and what it means for Greenland’s calving glaciers.
Publication day! Our new paper has just come out in The Cryosphere, and after what feels like rather a long gestation, I’m delighted to finally be able to share it – The full paper is open access and available here: Hedetoft, Bang Brinck and Mottram et al. (2026).
This is the paper I was working on while I was in Ilulissat back in May 2024, watching icebergs drift around the bay and setting up time lapse cameras from my guest house window. At the time I wrote that “one of the papers I’m working on this week analyses those iceberg related datasets” — well, this is that paper, and it’s been quite a journey to get it into print.
The back story
As I wrote back in one of my several Qaanaaq posts, my colleague Steffen Malskær Olsen has been running a long-term observation programme in the fjord near Qaanaaq for 15 years now. That programme, and the field laboratory DMI maintains there, gave us an extraordinary opportunity to study something that glaciologists have been arguing about for years: what role does ice mélange actually play in controlling calving?
Ice mélange — sometimes known as sikussaq in Greenlandic — is that chaotic jumble of icebergs, bergy bits and sea water that sits in front of marine-terminating glaciers. It’s been described as the world’s largest granular material, and it’s a characteristic feature of pretty much every calving glacier in Greenland. In winter, landfast sea ice forms and acts as a kind of seasonal glue, sticking the whole mass together. The question is: does this frozen-together mass actually hold the glacier back, like a tiny ice shelf? Or is it more like a pile of rubble that the glacier shoves ahead of it with barely any resistance?
Iceberg melange in front of Melville glacier, with ridges and fractures in the sea ice forming as the glacier pushes through the winter.The scientific community has been somewhat split on this. Some studies point to mélange as a mechanical inhibitor of calving — the idea being that calving only really kicks off once the mélange weakens or disappears. Others find the buttressing effect is limited, or depends heavily on whether landfast sea ice is present to bond the icebergs together. Most of the attention has been on the big, famous glaciers like Jakobshavn Isbræ and Helheim, which are enormous, fast-flowing, and in long narrow fjords. But what about the smaller, more typical glaciers that make up the majority of Greenland’s calving outlets?
That’s where Inglefield Fjord comes in.
The study site
We focused on three neighbouring glaciers at the head of Inglefield Bredning (Kangerlussuaq) in Northwest Greenland, at about 77.6°N: Tracy, Farquhar, and Melville glaciers. They’re a nice set because they’re different sizes — Tracy is the biggest at about 223 km², Melville is 119 km², and Farquhar is the smallest at 54 km² — and they’ve all been retreating at different rates over the last few decades. Tracy has been the fastest, retreating at about 200 m per year since the 1980s, twice as fast as Farquhar. Melville has been the slowest.
The area is also, crucially, accessible. The nearby town of Qaanaaq and the DMI field station there meant we could get out onto the sea ice by dog sled in late winter, working with local hunters and fishers who know the ice and the fjord far better than we ever will. This is something I want to emphasise, as I have before: this kind of science is a team sport, and the local community in Qaanaaq are absolutely essential to it.
What we did
The core of the study is a set of GNSS-tracking buoys that we deployed directly into the mélange zone, drilling holes in the sea ice and dropping them in. They recorded their position every 10 to 30 minutes and transmitted it back to us via the Iridium satellite network. When the sea ice broke up in July, the buoys floated free and were recovered by boat — again, thanks to our friends in Qaanaaq — and redeployed the following year.
We used two types of buoy: the TRUSTED buoys, which are a proprietary system from a Danish company (very robust as demonstrated by the incredible twists the metal stakes had from being over ridden by icebergs, a long battery life, but unfortunately rather limited position precision), and the OMB buoys, which are open-source instruments that we could customise to record more frequently, though they unfortunately proved a bit more vulnerable in this environment. Both have their strengths, and using both gave us a nice combination of reliability and detail. Not in the paper but deployed this year was even a third type – so watch out for more coming from this programme…
In March 2022 we deployed 6 buoys at Tracy and Farquhar. In March 2023 we deployed 8 buoys (6 TRUSTED and 2 OMB) across all three glaciers. The buoys tracked the mélange from late winter through to the break-up in mid-July, giving us a continuous, high-resolution record of how the mélange was moving — something that satellites alone can’t provide at this temporal frequency.
On top of the buoy data, we used quite a few other techniques to build a story.
- Satellite imagery from ESA’s Sentinel-1 (radar, works in the dark and through clouds) and Sentinel-2 and Landsat (optical) to track calving front positions and identify calving events. We used a deep learning dataset from our co-author Erik Loebel to automatically extract calving front positions, but we also spent a lot of time manually checking satellite images because, frankly, the automated method sometimes confused the mélange edge with the glacier front, on the other hand our results independently confirmed that on a seasonal scale, the machine learning calving front detection actually works quite well!
- Ice velocity data from our colleagues at PROMICE, again using ESA’s Sentinel-1 product, which (handily for us) isn’t masked to the ice sheet only, so it includes velocities from the mélange zone too.
- Climate data from CARRA (the Copernicus Arctic Regional Reanalysis, a very cool 2.5 km resolution climate reanalysis for the Arctic) for winds, and our trusty HIRHAM5 regional climate model for surface melt and runoff timing.
The idea was to bring all these different datasets together and see how calving, mélange movement, glacier velocity, sea ice, and surface mass budget all interact over the course of a season.
What we found
I’ll try to keep this readable, but there’s quite a lot of detail in the paper for those who want it, so here are our key findings
1. The mélange moves steadily — with sudden jumps
The buoys showed the mélange creeping slowly but continuously away from the glacier fronts, at speeds of roughly 2–11 metres per day, punctuated by occasional abrupt jumps. These jumps were larger and more frequent closer to the glacier fronts, and the larger Tracy glacier had more influence on mélange velocity than the other two. This fits with the idea of the glacier pushing the mélange down-fjord, like a slow-motion conveyor belt but with the rigid land fast ice causing resistance that abruptly fractures.
Velocity from the GNSS buoys at the top, compared with the satellite data at the bottom. The overpass and processing frequency of the satellite data smooths the velocities measured by the GNSS buoys.2. Calving happens even in deep winter
This was perhaps the most striking result. We observed large calving events at the peak of the fast ice season — in other words, when the landfast sea ice was at its thickest and most extensive, and the mélange was fully frozen together. Neither the landfast ice nor the mélange fully suppressed calving. This challenges the idea that mélange acts as a simple mechanical brake.
Calving front time series at the central flow line at (a) Tracy glacier, (b) Farquhar glacier and (c) Melville glacier for 2022 and
2023. Calving front positions are marked with black dots, and solid gray lines connect entries for each year. Red and blue backgrounds
symbolise positive and negative temperatures, respectively, based on 2m air temperature data from CARRA at 12:00UTC and the dashed
vertical lines represent sea ice break-up dates for the two years in question, 16 July 2022 and 25 July 2023, identified from changes in buoy
movements and examination of optical satellite imagery. (Loebel et al., 2023).3. No tidal signal in the mélange
Inspired by this paper, we did a spectral analysis of the high-resolution OMB buoy data to look for tidal or diurnal cycles in the mélange movement. We found none. In fact we found something even a bit more interesting that – we had one buoy that seemed to show some kind of diurnal periodicity, but very complete spectral analysis found no tidal signal at all. We concluded the periodicity relates to the GNSS signal itself – a warning to analyse full all your data and consider other hypotheses as well as the favourite one!
The mélange during the fast ice season appears to be driven almost entirely by the glacier pushing from behind and perhaps by wind forcing, not by tides. This is interesting because tides are sometimes invoked as a driver of calving events via the melange, but at least at these glaciers during the fast ice season, we see no evidence of it.
4. Unbonded mélange doesn’t do much — it’s the landfast ice that matters – but only in winter
This is probably the key finding. When the mélange is just a loose jumble of icebergs (as it is in summer, after the sea ice has broken up), it has very little influence on glacier velocity or calving rates. It’s only when the individual ice blocks are frozen into a matrix of land fast sea ice — losing their “granular material” properties and becoming more like a rigid, multi-year sea ice cover — that they appear to exert any kind of braking effect. And even then, that effect is limited.
5. It’s a combination of factors
Putting it all together, our conclusion is that at these representative small and medium-sized Greenland outlet glaciers, seasonal calving behaviour is modulated by a combination of surface melt, glacier velocity, and the presence of landfast sea ice that bonds the mélange. It’s not one thing — it’s the interplay of several, and the landfast ice acts more to delay the removal of mélange than to prevent calving outright.
Why does this matter?
Calving processes account for roughly half of the total mass loss from the Greenland ice sheet, yet they remain poorly represented in ice sheet models. It’s something I’ve been working on since my PhD. If we can’t model calving properly, we can’t project future sea level rise properly — and for a country like Denmark, that’s a rather existential question.
Most previous mélange studies have focused on the big, dramatic glaciers. Our study suggests that at the more typical, smaller glaciers that make up the bulk of Greenland’s calving outlets, the story is more nuanced. Mélange buttressing isn’t a simple on/off switch. It depends on whether the icebergs are bonded together by landfast sea ice, and even then, the effect is modest. Surface melt and glacier dynamics seem to matter more and these are all inter-realted processes, typically the air temperature gets warmer, the ice surface starts to melt, the glacier starts to accelerate and the sea ice gets weaker and thinner all at the same time. We have confounding variables which makes the picture difficult to disentangle.
We also hope the dataset we’ve collected — the in-situ buoy tracks, the satellite-derived calving fronts, the velocity comparisons — will be useful for other groups working on modelling mélange processes. There’s very little in situ data across seasons with this kind of temporal resolution, and we’d be delighted if others can use it to test and improve their models.
Some Criticisms… and what’s next?
We had a very excellent editor and really good reviewers who gave the paper a through filleting. You can see these online as the Cryosphere has open review. I thank them all for their good comments which certainly clarified the paper. The main criticism that may still be levelled is what about the melange thickness? Maybe these glaciers don’t see an effect because the melange is thin and weak? Well we do go into that in the paper. These are pretty representative glaciers for Greenland by any measure and perhaps the glaciologists view of melange processes is slightly skewed by all the studies at Jakobshavn/Sermeq Kujalleq and Helheim? However, when you stand in the melange zone, it becomes very clear just how heterogenous it is. The large icebergs make up a relatively small portion of the total area, so current models, using “melange thickness” as a tuning parameter are missing some subtlty, which probably turns out to be important in this subject area.
And there’ll definitely be more on melange dimensions and how that relates to buttressing, coming very soon!
UAV shot of a sea ice lead in the melange zone of Tracy glacier, 2023Acknowledgements
This paper was led by Sofie Hedetoft and Olivia Bang Brinck, who share first authorship with me and who did the lion’s share of the analysis and making of the figures. It’s been a real pleasure working with them and we would certainly not have got very far the rest of the team: Andrea Gierisch and Steffen Malskær Olsen, who were fantastic field work colleagues and a great inspiration for the ideas in this paper, Martin Olesen and Nicolaj Hansen for climate and SMB insights, Anders Anker Bjørk for finding our marvellous students and offering great advice on ice velocioty products, Erik Loebel for the automated calving front analysis, Anne Solgaard for the satellite data processing and assistance in interpretation and Peter Thejll whose expertise in statistics and spectral analysis is unrivalled.
As ever, none of this would have been possible without the local community in Qaanaaq — the hunters and fishers who guided us, transported us by dog sled, helped install instruments and recovered our buoys by boat when the ice broke up. Our DMI colleague Aksel Ascanius, who lives and works in Qaanaaq, has been an essential part of the programme throughout.
The work was carried out under the auspices of the Danish National Centre for Climate Research (NCKF), funded by the Danish Government, with additional contributions from EU Horizon Europe frameworks and ESA’s Climate Change Initiative for the Greenland ice sheet.
The full paper is open access — please go and read it, and do get in touch if you have questions or comments. I’m always happy to hear from people, whether on here, on mastodon, or by email.
Hedetoft, S., Bang Brinck, O., Mottram, R., et al. (2026). Mélange, landfast sea ice, ice velocities: What controls seasonal calving rates in North West Greenland? The Cryosphere, 20, 5071–5098. https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-20-5071-2026
#climateChange #DMI #fieldwork #glaciers #Greenland #GreenlandIceSheet #Science -
Nepal demands that big polluters pay for the devastation recent floods caused - and we couldn't agree more!
It’s time to make polluters pay for the climate chaos they’re fuelling around the world.
Where are these governments supposed to get the money to pay for climate damages?
By taxing fossil fuels industries too >> https://act.gp/3RLI2EV
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Whether you support the Greens or not this should be release unredacted.
The study paints a devastating picture of severe food shortages, price rises, migration, political destabilisation and possible war, resulting from the collapse of ecosystems, fuelled by the human-induced climate crisis and over-exploitation. The full report has not been released. Meanwhile deniers fill the airwaves with shote ‘nothing to see here’ propoganda.
