Pine Island Glacier

The Climate Show #26: All the news that fits

by Gareth May 4, 2012

Aafter a busy month of harvesting (Gareth) and breakfast broadcasting (Glenn), the Climate Show returns with all the latest climate news: from the thinning of Antarctic ice shelves and the intensification of hydrological cycle (floods and drought, that is) to satellites capturing solar energy and beaming it down to earth, we’ve got it all. And [...]

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Cracked PIG spawns big berg

by Gareth November 3, 2011

NASA’s IceBridge operation for this Antarctic summer has discovered that the Pine Island Glacier is in the process of calving a massive iceberg — 880 square kilometres of the floating glacier tongue is about to go floatabout, leaving the glacier snout shorter than any time since its position was first recorded in the 1940s. The [...]

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Fraser’s Penguins

by Bryan Walker January 10, 2011

I decided to read Fen Montaigne’s book Fraser’s Penguins: A Journey to the Future in Antarctica because of what I understood it would have to say about climate change. It does say very important things on that subject, but along the way it proved a fascinating account of the life of the Adélie penguins of [...]

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Warming at the walls of the “citadel of ice”

by Bryan Walker November 24, 2010

Australian-born writer Meredith  Hooper was looking for “a route into the complex business of the Earth’s changing climate” when she spent January to March 2002 at Palmer Station on the west coast of the Antarctic Peninsula. She watched and chronicled the work of scientist Bill Fraser and his team who for years have studied the [...]

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Tipping and other points

by Gareth February 15, 2010

During the Copenhagen kerfuffle a lot of interesting stuff hit the web: here’s something that deserves a bit more air – a Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS) special issue on tipping elements in the earth system, edited by John Schellnhuber, the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. [...]

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More than a metre

by Bryan Walker September 10, 2009

Sea level will rise by more than a metre by 2100 according to the authors of the third chapter in the World Wide Fund for Nature’s new Arctic report, introduced by Gareth a few days ago. Eric Rignot, one of the two authors of the chapter, is principal scientist for the Radar Science and Engineering [...]

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The PIG is flying

by Gareth August 18, 2009

The Pine Island Glacier in West Antarctica is thinning four times faster than 10 years ago, a new study(*) of satellite measurements shows. Since 1994, the central portion of the glacier has thinned by as much as 90 metres, and the ice surface is currently lowering by 16 metres a year. At this rate of [...]

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This is hardcore

by Gareth March 19, 2009

The last time that atmospheric CO2 levels were as high as today, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) regularly retreated or collapsed, causing sea level rises of up to 7 metres according to the first analysis of the first ANDRILL core, published in Nature today. The ANDRILL (Antarctic Geological Drilling) programme, a joint effort by [...]

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Five feet high and rising!

by Gareth February 12, 2009

Yesterday, while dissembling, I had what I might loosely describe as a “bugger” moment. Yale’s Enviroment360 web site (which I plugged on its introduction last June) currently features an interview with Robert Bindschadler, a NASA ice expert who is working on the Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers in West Antarctica. The “bugger” moment? e360: And [...]

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Tuesday linkfest

by Gareth October 20, 2007

Labour weekend means just that, chez Hot Topic. Catching up with farm work, planting the vege garden, getting a sore back – all in a weekend’s work. But climate change waits for no man, so here’s a compendium of stuff that caught my attention over the last few days. Contact Energy has announced plans for [...]

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