Author: Chris Mooney

Scientists have documented a recent, massive melt event on the surface of highly vulnerable West Antarctica that, they fear, could be a harbinger of future events as the planet continues to warm. In the Antarctic summer of 2016, the surface of the Ross Ice Shelf, the largest floating ice platform on Earth, developed a sheet…

A long-growing crack in the Larsen C ice shelf, one of Antarctica’s largest floating platforms of ice, appears to be nearing its endgame. Researchers with Project MIDAS, working out of Swansea University and Aberystwyth University in Wales and studying the shelf by satellites and through other techniques, have released an update showing that the crack…

A new scientific analysis finds that the Earth’s oceans are rising nearly three times as rapidly as they were throughout most of the 20th century, one of the strongest indications yet that a much feared trend of not just sea level rise, but its acceleration, is now underway. “We have a much stronger acceleration in…

U.S. government scientists have found a dramatic impact from the continuing decline of coral reefs: The seafloor around them is eroding and sinking, deepening coastal waters and exposing nearby communities to damaging waves that reefs used to weaken. The new study, conducted by researchers with the U.S. Geological Survey, examined reefs in Hawaii, the Florida…

The first photographs of a new and ominous crack in Greenland’s enormous Petermann glacier were captured by a NASA airborne mission on Friday. NASA’s Operation IceBridge, which has been flying over northwest Greenland for the past several days, took the photos after being provided coordinates by Stef Lhermitte, a professor at Delft University of Technology…

The largest glacier in Greenland is even more vulnerable to sustained ice losses than previously thought, scientists have reported. Jakobshavn glacier, responsible for feeding flotillas of icebergs into the Ilulissat icefjord — and possibly for unleashing the iceberg that sank the Titanic — is an enormous outlet for the larger Greenland ice sheet, which itself…

Floating sea ice at the top of the world has set another troubling record for its low spatial extent, shattering a prior record set just two years ago for this key component of the planet’s climate system. According to the National Snow and Ice Data Center, the sheet of Arctic sea ice, which expands and…