44% of Earth’s glaciers in high-relief mountains are covered by rock debris that insulate the ice from atmospheric forcing, reducing ice melt. However, as the debris cover is not homogeneous, space remains that produce differential melting under variable debris thicknesses, creating a surface morphology in the form of strongly incised […]

In summer 2021, the field work in the Arctic was once more dominated by the weather and sea conditions. The team still tried their best to bring the scientists to all planned sampling sides in order to get a better insight into the Arctic marine fauna and their exposure to […]

Volcanoes can have major impacts on the climate system, resulting in short-term cooling of earth’s surface following an eruption. Amongst the most active regions in the world is Iceland, the activity of which is reflected in its extremely diverse and largely desolate landscape. However, despite the high-activity of these volcanic […]

Arctic permafrost is currently undergoing rapid changes. While regions like Alaska, the Russian Arctic or Svalbard have several long-term monitoring sites, the knowledge on permafrost distribution, thickness and change in general, and on rockglacier dynamics in particular, is very limited for Greenland. Finally, in summer 2021, we travelled to Disko […]

Ice mass loss from Greenland has accelerated over the last few decades and it has recently been predicted that Greenland could become ice free in the next millennium. During past interglacial periods, when global mean temperatures reached values larger than today, the Greenland Ice Sheet was most likely smaller than […]

How does accelerated climate change in the Arctic affect the ecosystems of Greenlandic Fjords? This is the central question which the GreenFjord project funded by the SPI Flagship Initiative aims to answer in the upcoming four years. Therefore each of the six individual research clusters within the project focuses on […]

Early in the morning of 7 June 2022, 28 glaciology students from around the world convened at the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) for the sixth biennial International Summer School in Glaciology.After a short welcome and introduction of the instructors, we lost no time and quickly got onto vans to […]

MoMuCAMS stands for Modular, Multiplatform-Compatible Air Measurement System. Behind what at first seems like a mouthful, lies what may appear as a simple box carrying a set of instruments (Fig. 2). The truth is more complex than that… It all started in May 2020 in the Extreme Environments Research Lab […]

Arctic rivers and their deltas are increasingly impacted by the rapid changes the Northern regions are currently facing. The Canadian Northwest Territories have witnessed dramatic increases in temperature and precipitation over the last decade, leading to widespread thawing of previously frozen soils (permafrost). To investigate whether this changing climate has […]