#glaciers — Public Fediverse posts

https://www.europesays.com/ch/128521/ Nepal’s flood disaster and the impact of climate change loom large in the icy shadow of Mont Blanc #Alps #ClimateAndEnvironment #ClimateChange #EarthScience #Floods #FranceNepalMontBlancAlpsClimateChange #GeneralNews #glaciers #NaturalDisasters #NepalTibetFloods #weather #WorldNews

Les Diablerets, Switzerland
Blankets made of sheep’s wool and synthetic material are laid over glacier ice at Glacier 3000, as part of an experiment testing a natural, biodegradable alternative to synthetic coverings to reduce glacier melt. The experiment has shown promising preliminary results.

Photograph: Fabrice Coffrini/AFP/Getty
Images

#photography
#Switzerland
#ClimateChange
#GlobalWarming
#glaciers

Les Diablerets, Switzerland
Blankets made of sheep’s wool and synthetic material are laid over glacier ice at Glacier 3000, as part of an experiment testing a natural, biodegradable alternative to synthetic coverings to reduce glacier melt. The experiment has shown promising preliminary results.

Photograph: Fabrice Coffrini/AFP/Getty
Images

#photography
#Switzerland
#ClimateChange
#GlobalWarming
#glaciers

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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.

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.

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!

Acknowledgements

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

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?

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.

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.

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!

Acknowledgements

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

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?

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.

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.

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!

Acknowledgements

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

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?

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.

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.

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!

Acknowledgements

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

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?

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.

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.

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!

Acknowledgements

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

Climbing the Mont Blanc is getting ever more dangerous, as glacier melt leads to rockfalls.

https://apnews.com/article/france-nepal-mont-blanc-alps-climate-change-e2274e400f6fcd96826fc56f5f14771a

#Climate #ClimateCrisis #Mountains #Glaciers #Alps

Nepal’s flood disaster and the impact of climate change loom large in the icy shadow of Mont Blanc

CHAMONIX-MONT-BLANC, France (AP) — For centuries, French and Italian mountain communities on the flanks of Western Europe’s highest…
#France #FR #Europe #EU #Climateandenvironment #Climatechange #earth-science #floods #france-nepal-mont-blanc-alps-climate-change #Generalnews #glaciers #i #Naturaldisasters #nepal-tibet-floods #weather #Worldnews
https://www.europesays.com/france/76517/

Could Japan see more avalanches like one that hit Nepal?

While scientists are working to pin down the exact mechanism behind last month’s deadly mudslide in Nepal, they…
#EuropeSays #Japan #JP #climatechange #floods #GLACIERS #Japanese #Landslides #Nepal #rain
https://www.europesays.com/japan/88751/

https://www.europesays.com/ch/128019/ Mont Blanc’s icy facade melts as climate warming reshapes Alpine landscape #Alps #Climate #ClimateAndEnvironment #ClimateChange #EarthScience #Europe #Floods #France #GeneralNews #glaciers #italy #NaturalDisasters #Nepal #NepalTibetFloods #StphaneBozon #weather #WorldNews

Another nasty feedback enhancing climate change. Arctic glaciers hold bakc a bunch of ancient methane stored in the rocks beneath the ice. The more glaciers melt, the more methane they are likely to release.

Link: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-77190-z

#ClimateChange #Glaciers #Methane

The mountain section whose collapse triggered fatal floods in Nepal and China on Aug. 26 had experienced unprecedented heat for the time of year, meteorological data analyzed by a researcher shows. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/environment/2026/09/09/climate-change/nepal-glacier-heat-floods-researcher/?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=mastodon #environment #climatechange #climatechange #nepal #glaciers

https://www.europesays.com/ch/127981/ Not just Nepal: How climate change puts European Alps under threat of glacial retreat and rock fall #Alps #ClimateChange #EnvironmentalImpact #EuropeanAlps #GlacialRetreat #glaciers #MontBlanc #permafrost #RockFall

Nepal’s flood disaster and the impact of climate change loom large in the icy shadow of Mont Blanc

CHAMONIX-MONT-BLANC, France (AP) — For centuries, French and Italian mountain communities on the flanks of Western Europe’s highest…
#France #FR #Europe #EU #Climateandenvironment #Climatechange #earth-science #floods #france-nepal-mont-blanc-alps-climate-change #Generalnews #glaciers #i #Naturaldisasters #nepal-tibet-floods #weather #Worldnews
https://www.europesays.com/france/76395/

Nepal’s flood disaster and the impact of climate change loom large in the icy shadow of Mont Blanc https://www.byteseu.com/2349259/ #ClimateAndEnvironment #ClimateChange #EarthScience #floods #France #FranceNepalMontBlancAlpsClimateChange #GeneralNews #Glaciers #I #NaturalDisasters #NepalTibetFloods #weather #WorldNews

https://www.europesays.com/ch/127959/ Nepal’s flood disaster and the impact of climate change loom large in the icy shadow of Mont Blanc #Alps #ClimateAndEnvironment #ClimateChange #EarthScience #Floods #FranceNepalMontBlancAlpsClimateChange #GeneralNews #glaciers #i #NaturalDisasters #NepalTibetFloods #weather #WorldNews

As rescuers search for the thousands still missing in Nepal following catastrophic flooding that killed 1,250 people, the nation's leaders face a second immense challenge of how to pay for recovery and rebuilding. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/environment/2026/09/07/climate-change/nepal-flood-payout-climate-aid/?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=mastodon #environment #climatechange #nepal #un #climatechange #floods #glaciers #drought #climatefinance #fossilfuels #emissions

The Nepal and Tibet flood is a warning: melting snow and ice will bring more disasters around the world | Bill McGuire
By Bill McGuire

In Alaska, the Himalayas, the Andes, Greenland, and perhaps also the Alps, deadly chain reactions are just waiting to be triggered

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/sep/01/nepal-tibet-flood-alaska-himalayas-andes-greenland-alps

#NepalTibetflooddisaster #Climatecrisis #Flooding #Earthquakes #Tsunamis #Landslides #Naturaldisasters #Volcanoes #Glaciers #Environment #Extremeweather #TheGuardian #BillMcGuire

The Nepal and Tibet flood is a warning: melting snow and ice will bring more disasters around the world | Bill McGuire https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/sep/01/nepal-tibet-flood-alaska-himalayas-andes-greenland-alps #NepaltibetFloodDisaster #ClimateCrisis #Flooding #Earthquakes #Tsunamis #Landslides #NaturalDisasters #Volcanoes #Glaciers #Environment #ExtremeWeather

The most dramatic proof of our current climate catastrophe ever caught on camera

https://web.brid.gy/r/https://www.upworthy.com/the-largest-proof-of-climate-catastrophe-ex1/

«…This collapse could be a result of global heating. “It’s not that much of a stretch to think, yes, we’re seeing one terrible ramification of human-caused climate change,” he says.…»

".…could be.…" and ".…not that much of a stretch.…"??? Could we even possibly make this accusation any more feebly?

Was anyone predicting glaciers would melt before climate change? They were formerly the kind of long-term fixed thing no one expected to change all of a sudden. Remember the phrase "moving at a glacial pace"?? That didn't arise because glaciers were prone to visible change in a short time.

But then climate scientists did their job and carefully worked out a lot of detailed consequences of physics, predicting that glaciers would be melting more and more everywhere, and that floods and mud slides and ultimately drought would be the next thing we'd see.

It doesn't take a complex analysis to attribute this to climate change. It takes a conspiracy of denialists, and the people that work for them, to suppress credence about the science if you want to tamp down anything so painfully obvious.

This is not a case where something happened and people said "what a surprise. we'll have to figure out the cause", like when a building burns down that no one expected to. This is a building that had a blaze burning in the front yard already and someone was positioning a large fan to assure the flames went toward the building in a known-to-be-dangerous way and then the building burned down and people are saying "hmm, we'll have to see what the cause might have been".

We need to stop reporting these events in isolation and report them as part of a coherent whole. Climate scientists' "a priori" predictions need their due. Predictions were copiously made in advance that the climate dice are not random but loaded, that bad things were about to happen. This is not a time for an "a posteriori" analysis where we pretend we thought the dice were fair and that sometimes bad things just happen randomly.

«Rick: How can you close me up? On what grounds?
Captain Renault: I'm shocked! Shocked to find that gambling is going on in here.
[a croupier hands Renault a pile of money]
Croupier: Your winnings, sir.
Captain Renault: [sotto voce] Oh, thank you very much.…»
Source: IMDB

#climate #ClimateDenial #nepal #mudslides #glaciers #GlobalWarming #GlobalHeating #melting

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2586497-a-glacier-collapse-is-most-likely-cause-of-the-nepal-disaster/

Ah, the "Climate Dashboard"—because nothing says urgent environmental crisis like scrolling through endless menus of jargon 🤔📊. Marvel at the riveting insight that #glaciers are made of ice and—get this—they melt! 💧❄️ Meanwhile, the planet sizzles, but hey, enjoy navigating that dashboard! 🌍🔥
https://climate.metoffice.cloud/glaciers.html #ClimateDashboard #EnvironmentalCrisis #GlobalWarming #Melting #HackerNews #ngated

Snow and #ice on #Swiss #glaciers #melting at alarming rate amid heatwave, expert says

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jun/27/snow-and-ice-on-swiss-glaciers-melting-at-alarming-rate-amid-heatwave-expert-says

Accumulation on #Switzerland ’s glaciers from last winter expected to all be gone by Monday amid ‘enormous’ melt rates across #Alps

#Scientists have definitively taken us beyond the #BigBang : Medium

A #Hoard of #Gold #Treasures reveals the true #Power of a #Mysterious #BronzeAge #Civilization : Nat Geo

#Glaciers in the '#Roof of the #World' have suddenly started #Melting : New Sci

Latest #KnowledgeLinks

https://knowledgezone.co.in/resources/bookmarks

Alaska’s 2025 mega tsunami highlights risk to cruise lines as glaciers retreat https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/may/06/alaska-mega-tsunami-climate-change-glacier #UsNews #Glaciers #ClimateCrisis #Environment #Alaska #Tsunamis #ExtremeWeather

When we picture the effects of melting #glaciers , many of us think of rising seas and retreating ice streams. But along #greenlands coastline, a quieter transformation is underway, one that is affecting how the ocean breathes and how it reacts to and buffers itself against change.

In Young Sound, a fjord carved into Greenland’s remote NE coast, decades of monitoring have revealed that glacial #meltwater does not simply dilute the salt in seawater.

https://eos.org/science-updates/melting-glaciers-make-the-coastal-ocean-more-sensitive

#climatechange

Rain is coming to Antarctica – here’s how it will change the frozen continent
#Antarctica #AntarcticPeninsula #ClimateChange #Glaciers #IceSheets #SeaIce #IceShelves #LarsenIceShelf #Penguins #Penguins #ExtremeWeather #PolarResearch #Environment
https://the-14.com/rain-is-coming-to-antarctica-heres-how-it-will-change-the-frozen-continent/

Growing Meltwater Reservoirs – Glacial Lakes Are Both A Resource And A Habitat Worthy Of Protection
--
https://www.uni-potsdam.de/en/headlines-and-featured-stories/detail/2026-01-28-growing-meltwater-reservoirs-glacial-lakes-are-both-a-resource-and-a-habitat-worthy-of-protection <-- shared technical article
--
https://doi.org/10.1038/s44221-025-00578-6 <-- shared paper
--
https://github.com/geveh/LakeVolumes <-- shared GitHub ‘code base’
--
#glaciallakes #GLOF #geomorphology #glaciers #hydrology #waterresources #glacier #melting #retreating #hydrogeomorphology #GIS #spatial #mapping #global #spatialanalysis #global #cryosphere #ice #water #hydrology #mountains #highaltitude #naturalresource #freshwater #reservoir #sediment #sedimentation #spatiotemporal #remotesensing #earthobservation #landcover #Arctic #coastal #meltwater #lake #longevity #watersecurity #risk #hazard #ecosystem #habitat #naturalhazard #planning #tourism #economy #usecase #watersupply #worldwide #population #demographics #glacial
@University of Potsdam | @University Of Leeds

Who needs #BioLabs when there's all sorts of #bacteria about to be exposed after thousands of years!

Researchers issue warning after making grim #Antarctic discovery: 'We are only beginning to understand'

Story by Daysia Tolentino, January 29, 2026

Excerpt: "A study published in the journal #Biocontaminant examined the effects of #GlacialMelting on our #WaterSupply.

"#Glaciers serve as reservoirs for #AntibioticResistanceGenes, or #ARGs, and other #microbes. When they are released from the ice, they enter our water systems, posing a major health risk to people downstream.

"Millions of people get their water from glacier-fed rivers and lakes. ARGs are strands of DNA that make bacteria more resistant to drugs. When ARGs in #meltwater make their way into our water supply, they become a global public health risk.

"The study emphasizes the importance of viewing glaciers, rivers, and lakes as being part of a 'glacier continuum.' This means they are an interconnected system rather than separate environments.

Why are melting glaciers concerning?

"From our gas-powered cars to #overconsumption, human activity has contributed to the production of heat-trapping gases that warm the planet. Rising global temperatures have caused glaciers to rapidly melt, causing elevated sea levels and releasing ARGs.

"ARGs from melting glaciers are worrisome because they help facilitate the spread of diseases. This threat is compounded by the fact that our growing #microplastic problem is also helping #AntibioticResistant #bacteria breed. As a result, #medicines are being rendered less effective."

https://www.msn.com/en-us/weather/topstories/researchers-issue-warning-after-making-grim-antarctic-discovery-we-are-only-beginning-to-understand/

#WorldPol #USPol #FossilFuels #FossilFools #Degrowth #RenewablesNow #WaterIsLife #OceansAreLife #HumanFolly #NewDiseases

Read my piece, "#Earthquakes, #Evolution, and Darwin’s Exploits in #Chile" https://nkozphoto.com/index.php/2025/11/05/earthquakes-evolution-and-darwins-exploits-in-chile/ #tectonics #concepcion #science #darwin #greenland #norway #bronzeage #santiago #geology #climate #climatechange #climatecrisis #voltaire #candide #lisbon #tsunami #glaciers #landslides #tierradelfuego #mining #Aegean #Hittites #Mycenae

The cloudy, sediment-laden #meltwater from #glaciers is a key source of nutrients for #ocean life, but a new study suggests that as #climate change causes many glaciers to shrink and retreat their meltwater may become less nutritious.
#EarthScience #Environmental #ClimateChange #MarineBiology #sflorg
https://www.sflorg.com/2025/10/es10222501.html

@gerrymcgovern

*The Detrimental Effects of Data Centers' Rising #WaterConsumption*

(8/8)

...7) Melting #Glaciers:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03436-z

https://fediscience.org/@Ruth_Mottram/114529325386952028

#AI #ClimateCrisis

//

14-May-2025
#Alaska: Ancient cave sediments provide new #climate clues
Discovery of 20,000-year-old cave #sediments on Prince of Wales Island offers rare land-based evidence of ancient #meltwater events

https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1083622
#science #paleoClimate #glaciers

Stories from #TheAmazon, #Kenya and #Zimbabwe

#WorldWaterDay: 3 stories of #resistance and #restoration from around the globe

Kristine Sabillo, 21 Mar 2025

"More than 2 billion people around the world live without access to safe drinkable water, as rivers, #groundwater, lakes and #glaciers face continued threats of #pollution and overexploitation due to #urbanization, #EnvironmentalDestruction, and #ClimateChange .

"This World Water Day, #Mongabay looks back at some of its coverage from 2024 on how local communities are trying to protect the world’s dwindling water resources."

https://news.mongabay.com/short-article/world-water-day-3-stories-of-resistance-and-restoration-from-around-the-globe/
#WaterSecurity #WaterIsLife #RiversAreLife #OceansAreLife #Wetlands #Marshes #Rivers

NEW EUROPEAN RECORD 🎉

We were able to detect the Pygmy Shrews (Sorex minutus) in the high #alpine up to 3,300 m a.s.l. in #SouthTyrol #Italy, 780 metres higher than known before 🐁

New short note in #Hystrix (w/ #ChiaraPaniccia & @Eliag from https://bsky.app/profile/euracalpenv.bsky.social )

📄 https://doi.org/10.4404/hystrix-00760-2024

#PygmyShrew #Shrews #SmallMammals #Hystrix #Südtirol #AltoAdige #EuropeanAlps #BiodiversityMonitoringSouthTyrol #GLORIA #Mountains #MountainPeaks #SoilFauna #SoilBiodiversity #Monitoring #AlpSoil_Lab #Glaciers #OetztalAlps #Sesvenna

NEW EUROPEAN RECORD 🎉

We were able to detect the Pygmy Shrews (Sorex minutus) in the high #alpine up to 3,300 m a.s.l. in #SouthTyrol #Italy, 780 metres higher than known before 🐁

New short note in #Hystrix (w/ #ChiaraPaniccia & @Eliag from https://bsky.app/profile/euracalpenv.bsky.social )

📄 https://doi.org/10.4404/hystrix-00760-2024

#PygmyShrew #Shrews #SmallMammals #Hystrix #Südtirol #AltoAdige #EuropeanAlps #BiodiversityMonitoringSouthTyrol #GLORIA #Mountains #MountainPeaks #SoilFauna #SoilBiodiversity #Monitoring #AlpSoil_Lab #Glaciers #OetztalAlps #Sesvenna

NEW EUROPEAN RECORD 🎉

We were able to detect the Pygmy Shrews (Sorex minutus) in the high #alpine up to 3,300 m a.s.l. in #SouthTyrol #Italy, 780 metres higher than known before 🐁

New short note in #Hystrix (w/ #ChiaraPaniccia & @Eliag from https://bsky.app/profile/euracalpenv.bsky.social )

📄 https://doi.org/10.4404/hystrix-00760-2024

#PygmyShrew #Shrews #SmallMammals #Hystrix #Südtirol #AltoAdige #EuropeanAlps #BiodiversityMonitoringSouthTyrol #GLORIA #Mountains #MountainPeaks #SoilFauna #SoilBiodiversity #Monitoring #AlpSoil_Lab #Glaciers #OetztalAlps #Sesvenna

NEW EUROPEAN RECORD 🎉

We were able to detect the Pygmy Shrews (Sorex minutus) in the high #alpine up to 3,300 m a.s.l. in #SouthTyrol #Italy, 780 metres higher than known before 🐁

New short note in #Hystrix (w/ #ChiaraPaniccia & @Eliag from https://bsky.app/profile/euracalpenv.bsky.social )

📄 https://doi.org/10.4404/hystrix-00760-2024

#PygmyShrew #Shrews #SmallMammals #Hystrix #Südtirol #AltoAdige #EuropeanAlps #BiodiversityMonitoringSouthTyrol #GLORIA #Mountains #MountainPeaks #SoilFauna #SoilBiodiversity #Monitoring #AlpSoil_Lab #Glaciers #OetztalAlps #Sesvenna

NEW EUROPEAN RECORD 🎉

We were able to detect the Pygmy Shrews (Sorex minutus) in the high #alpine up to 3,300 m a.s.l. in #SouthTyrol #Italy, 780 metres higher than known before 🐁

New short note in #Hystrix (w/ #ChiaraPaniccia & @Eliag from https://bsky.app/profile/euracalpenv.bsky.social )

📄 https://doi.org/10.4404/hystrix-00760-2024

#PygmyShrew #Shrews #SmallMammals #Hystrix #Südtirol #AltoAdige #EuropeanAlps #BiodiversityMonitoringSouthTyrol #GLORIA #Mountains #MountainPeaks #SoilFauna #SoilBiodiversity #Monitoring #AlpSoil_Lab #Glaciers #OetztalAlps #Sesvenna

Alaska's Juneau Icefield Is Melting At An 'Incredibly Worrying' 50,000 Gallons Per Second [1,577 billion (!) gallons per year]
--
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/alaskas-juneau-icefield-is-melting-at-an-incredibly-worrying-50000-gallons-per-second-researchers-find-180984650/ <-- shared technical article
--
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-49269-y <-- shared paper
--
#GIS #spatial #mapping #climatechange #glacier #glacial #melting #meltwater #Juneau #JuneauIcefield #geology #geomorphology #water #hydrology #snow #ice #Canada #USA #Alaska #BritishColumbia #remotesensing #satellite #imagery #humanimpacts #sealevelrise #SLR #sealevel #temperature #glaciers #icefield #risk #hazard #cryosphere

Climate: why disinformation is so persistent

A research team has tested six psychological interventions to combat climate misinformation. It shows how difficult it is to combat these messages, which are resistant to scientific information.

https://globalplantcouncil.org/climate-why-disinformation-is-so-persistent/ via @unigeneve #ClimateChange #Climate #COP28 #ClimateDisinformation #Disinformation #Nature #Science #Glaciers #HeatWave

autumn feeling in the Upper Austrian Alps

#Dachstein #Gosausee #Salzkammergut #autumn #Herbstlaub #Alpenseen #Austria #Gletscher #glaciers #Ostalpen #alpinelakes

#SeaIce around the #polar regions plays a critical part in #protecting the adjacent #IceSheets. Less sea ice means less #sunlight will be reflected back to #space, causing #waters to #warm more & #destabilize surrounding #ice & #glaciers. #Coastlines are also much more exposed w/less sea ice, removing a buffer that could help protect #melting #IceShelves or ice sheets.