Pad Yatra: A Green Odyssey “Pad Yatra: A Green Odyssey is the adventure of 700 people trekking across the Himalayas with a call to save the planet’s “3rd Pole,” a glacial region now devastated by the climate chaos associated with global warming. Battling the most treacherous terrain on the planet, the trekkers spread their message of […]

Chile’s environmental court ruled on Monday that the Pascua Lama gold mine is not responsible for damage done to three glaciers near the mine site. Some argue its a setback for Chilean science.

Mercury contamination has long been a threat to animal carnivores and human residents in the Arctic. Mercury exports from river basins to the ocean form a significant component of the Arctic mercury cycle, and are consequently of importance in understanding and addressing this contamination.  Jens Søndergaard of the Arctic Research Centre of Aarhus University, Denmark […]

Kathmandu, a Nepalese valley with a rich cultural and religious history, was the venue for the International Symposium on Glaciology in High-Mountain Asia early this month. From March 1 to 6, 240 scientists from 26 countries gathered there to further interdisciplinary understanding of the science of glaciers, snowpack, and permafrost in the high-mountain Asia region—the Himalayan, […]

Landslides on Glaciers “The chapter looks mainly at massive rock slope failures that generate high-speed, long- runout rock avalanches onto glaciers in high mountains, from subpolar through tropical latitudes. Drastic modifications of mountain landscapes and destructive impacts occur, and initiate other, longer-term hazards. Worst-case calamities are where mass flows continue into inhabited areas below the […]

The Tibetan plateau, the earth’s highest and largest plateau, sometimes called the “Roof of the World,”  and its immediately surrounding mountains contain the greatest diversity of bumblebee species in the globe. But, these little-studied populations may be threatened by climate change, new research shows. A paper, entitled “Bumblebees, climate and glaciers across the Tibetan plateau […]

Environmental conditions, including climate, strongly influence the distribution of plant species. As temperatures continue to rise around the world, many people are concerned about the possible shifts in distribution of plant species, since plants are immobile, and many of them have a limited ability to disperse. These restrictions to changes in their distribution are particularly severe for […]

A recent piece of biomedical research has drawn extensively from an unexpected source, glacial moraines. Moraines form as glaciers advance across landscapes over hundreds or even thousands of years, pushing rocks and boulders along their way. If you can imagine the pile of snow that accumulates in front of a sled as it rushes down towards the […]

Calved Greenland Iceberg  “Iceberg calving is ultimately related to the mechanical failure of ice. However, predicting mass loss from calving events remains challenging because calving takes on diferent forms under different conditions. For example, large tabular icebergs sporadically detach from freely foating ice tongues with many years of quiescence between major calving events” Read more […]

One of South America’s most active volcanoes, Villarrica, erupted Tuesday, 3 March 2015,  around 3 a.m. local time in Chile, creating a danger that lava would interact with the large ice cap on the mountain. The volcano spewed a lava fountain 1.5 kilometers into the air, and the pillar of smoke and ash reached 6-8 […]

Recent research has provided valuable information on glacier processes in the Hindu Kush Himalaya (HKH) mountains of South Asia, a region often called the “Third Pole” because it contains the largest area of ice outside the Arctic and Antarctic. Glacier retreat in this region has attracted considerable scientific and media attention. The 2007 Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel […]

Iceland is, in fact, a land of ice. It is home to at least 269 glaciers, which occupy the equivalent of over 1.4 billion Olympic swimming pools. But those glaciers are melting, causing the land underneath to rise as the weight of the ice lifts. According to a new study published online in Geophysical Research Letters […]