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 […]

Atmospheric pollution in the Arctic caused by newly emitted, anthropogenic persistent pollutants is a matter of growing concern. Due to the remoteness of the Arctic and Antarctic from most known sources, the poles are a location of choice to determine if specific chemicals are persistent and prone to long-range transport. […]

High-elevation and high-latitude ecosystems are, and will be, particularly affected by the rapid and unprecedent climate warming our planet is currently experiencing, with rates of temperature increase two to four times higher than the global average since the 1980s. In line with these warming trends over recent decades, most plant […]

Despite their beauty, glaciers can be very hostile environments for us scientists. Crevasses, seracs and other non-traversable terrain renders data sampling for glacier research difficult and dangerous, if not impossible. We believe that unmanned aerial vehicles (“UAVs”, commonly named drones) are key to mitigate this risk and to reach these […]

Tundra ecosystems are characterized by low stature vegetation, which covers the cold polar and alpine soils with dense mats of cryptogams, grasses and dwarf shrubs. Tundra is the area extending beyond the thermal limits of tree growth and reaching up until the permanent snow and glacier fields of the nival […]