sea level rise – Sterna Paradisaea

A jumble of broken ice, and what it means for Greenland’s calving glaciers.

Publication day! Our new paper has just come out in The Cryosphere, and after what feels like rather a long gestation, I’m delighted to finally be able to share it – The full paper is open access and available here: Hedetoft, Bang Brinck and Mottram et al. (2026).

This is the paper I was working on while I was in Ilulissat back in May 2024, watching icebergs drift around the bay and setting up time lapse cameras from my guest house window. At the time I wrote that “one of the papers I’m working on this week analyses those iceberg related datasets” — well, this is that paper, and it’s been quite a journey to get it into print.

The back story

As I wrote back in one of my several Qaanaaq posts, my colleague Steffen Malskær Olsen has been running a long-term observation programme in the fjord near Qaanaaq for 15 years now. That programme, and the field laboratory DMI maintains there, gave us an extraordinary opportunity to study something that glaciologists have been arguing about for years: what role does ice mélange actually play in controlling calving?

Ice mélange — sometimes known as sikussaq in Greenlandic — is that chaotic jumble of icebergs, bergy bits and sea water that sits in front of marine-terminating glaciers. It’s been described as the world’s largest granular material, and it’s a characteristic feature of pretty much every calving glacier in Greenland. In winter, landfast sea ice forms and acts as a kind of seasonal glue, sticking the whole mass together. The question is: does this frozen-together mass actually hold the glacier back, like a tiny ice shelf? Or is it more like a pile of rubble that the glacier shoves ahead of it with barely any resistance?

Iceberg melange in front of Melville glacier, with ridges and fractures in the sea ice forming as the glacier pushes through the winter.

The scientific community has been somewhat split on this. Some studies point to mélange as a mechanical inhibitor of calving — the idea being that calving only really kicks off once the mélange weakens or disappears. Others find the buttressing effect is limited, or depends heavily on whether landfast sea ice is present to bond the icebergs together. Most of the attention has been on the big, famous glaciers like Jakobshavn Isbræ and Helheim, which are enormous, fast-flowing, and in long narrow fjords. But what about the smaller, more typical glaciers that make up the majority of Greenland’s calving outlets?

That’s where Inglefield Fjord comes in.

The study site

We focused on three neighbouring glaciers at the head of Inglefield Bredning (Kangerlussuaq) in Northwest Greenland, at about 77.6°N: Tracy, Farquhar, and Melville glaciers. They’re a nice set because they’re different sizes — Tracy is the biggest at about 223 km², Melville is 119 km², and Farquhar is the smallest at 54 km² — and they’ve all been retreating at different rates over the last few decades. Tracy has been the fastest, retreating at about 200 m per year since the 1980s, twice as fast as Farquhar. Melville has been the slowest.

The area is also, crucially, accessible. The nearby town of Qaanaaq and the DMI field station there meant we could get out onto the sea ice by dog sled in late winter, working with local hunters and fishers who know the ice and the fjord far better than we ever will. This is something I want to emphasise, as I have before: this kind of science is a team sport, and the local community in Qaanaaq are absolutely essential to it.

What we did

The core of the study is a set of GNSS-tracking buoys that we deployed directly into the mélange zone, drilling holes in the sea ice and dropping them in. They recorded their position every 10 to 30 minutes and transmitted it back to us via the Iridium satellite network. When the sea ice broke up in July, the buoys floated free and were recovered by boat — again, thanks to our friends in Qaanaaq — and redeployed the following year.

We used two types of buoy: the TRUSTED buoys, which are a proprietary system from a Danish company (very robust as demonstrated by the incredible twists the metal stakes had from being over ridden by icebergs, a long battery life, but unfortunately rather limited position precision), and the OMB buoys, which are open-source instruments that we could customise to record more frequently, though they unfortunately proved a bit more vulnerable in this environment. Both have their strengths, and using both gave us a nice combination of reliability and detail. Not in the paper but deployed this year was even a third type – so watch out for more coming from this programme…

In March 2022 we deployed 6 buoys at Tracy and Farquhar. In March 2023 we deployed 8 buoys (6 TRUSTED and 2 OMB) across all three glaciers. The buoys tracked the mélange from late winter through to the break-up in mid-July, giving us a continuous, high-resolution record of how the mélange was moving — something that satellites alone can’t provide at this temporal frequency.

On top of the buoy data, we used quite a few other techniques to build a story.

Satellite imagery from ESA’s Sentinel-1 (radar, works in the dark and through clouds) and Sentinel-2 and Landsat (optical) to track calving front positions and identify calving events. We used a deep learning dataset from our co-author Erik Loebel to automatically extract calving front positions, but we also spent a lot of time manually checking satellite images because, frankly, the automated method sometimes confused the mélange edge with the glacier front, on the other hand our results independently confirmed that on a seasonal scale, the machine learning calving front detection actually works quite well!
Ice velocity data from our colleagues at PROMICE, again using ESA’s Sentinel-1 product, which (handily for us) isn’t masked to the ice sheet only, so it includes velocities from the mélange zone too.
Climate data from CARRA (the Copernicus Arctic Regional Reanalysis, a very cool 2.5 km resolution climate reanalysis for the Arctic) for winds, and our trusty HIRHAM5 regional climate model for surface melt and runoff timing.

The idea was to bring all these different datasets together and see how calving, mélange movement, glacier velocity, sea ice, and surface mass budget all interact over the course of a season.

What we found

I’ll try to keep this readable, but there’s quite a lot of detail in the paper for those who want it, so here are our key findings

1. The mélange moves steadily — with sudden jumps

The buoys showed the mélange creeping slowly but continuously away from the glacier fronts, at speeds of roughly 2–11 metres per day, punctuated by occasional abrupt jumps. These jumps were larger and more frequent closer to the glacier fronts, and the larger Tracy glacier had more influence on mélange velocity than the other two. This fits with the idea of the glacier pushing the mélange down-fjord, like a slow-motion conveyor belt but with the rigid land fast ice causing resistance that abruptly fractures.

Velocity from the GNSS buoys at the top, compared with the satellite data at the bottom. The overpass and processing frequency of the satellite data smooths the velocities measured by the GNSS buoys.

2. Calving happens even in deep winter

This was perhaps the most striking result. We observed large calving events at the peak of the fast ice season — in other words, when the landfast sea ice was at its thickest and most extensive, and the mélange was fully frozen together. Neither the landfast ice nor the mélange fully suppressed calving. This challenges the idea that mélange acts as a simple mechanical brake.

Calving front time series at the central flow line at (a) Tracy glacier, (b) Farquhar glacier and (c) Melville glacier for 2022 and
2023. Calving front positions are marked with black dots, and solid gray lines connect entries for each year. Red and blue backgrounds
symbolise positive and negative temperatures, respectively, based on 2m air temperature data from CARRA at 12:00UTC and the dashed
vertical lines represent sea ice break-up dates for the two years in question, 16 July 2022 and 25 July 2023, identified from changes in buoy
movements and examination of optical satellite imagery. (Loebel et al., 2023).

3. No tidal signal in the mélange

Inspired by this paper, we did a spectral analysis of the high-resolution OMB buoy data to look for tidal or diurnal cycles in the mélange movement. We found none. In fact we found something even a bit more interesting that – we had one buoy that seemed to show some kind of diurnal periodicity, but very complete spectral analysis found no tidal signal at all. We concluded the periodicity relates to the GNSS signal itself – a warning to analyse full all your data and consider other hypotheses as well as the favourite one!

The mélange during the fast ice season appears to be driven almost entirely by the glacier pushing from behind and perhaps by wind forcing, not by tides. This is interesting because tides are sometimes invoked as a driver of calving events via the melange, but at least at these glaciers during the fast ice season, we see no evidence of it.

4. Unbonded mélange doesn’t do much — it’s the landfast ice that matters – but only in winter

This is probably the key finding. When the mélange is just a loose jumble of icebergs (as it is in summer, after the sea ice has broken up), it has very little influence on glacier velocity or calving rates. It’s only when the individual ice blocks are frozen into a matrix of land fast sea ice — losing their “granular material” properties and becoming more like a rigid, multi-year sea ice cover — that they appear to exert any kind of braking effect. And even then, that effect is limited.

5. It’s a combination of factors

Putting it all together, our conclusion is that at these representative small and medium-sized Greenland outlet glaciers, seasonal calving behaviour is modulated by a combination of surface melt, glacier velocity, and the presence of landfast sea ice that bonds the mélange. It’s not one thing — it’s the interplay of several, and the landfast ice acts more to delay the removal of mélange than to prevent calving outright.

Why does this matter?

Calving processes account for roughly half of the total mass loss from the Greenland ice sheet, yet they remain poorly represented in ice sheet models. It’s something I’ve been working on since my PhD. If we can’t model calving properly, we can’t project future sea level rise properly — and for a country like Denmark, that’s a rather existential question.

Most previous mélange studies have focused on the big, dramatic glaciers. Our study suggests that at the more typical, smaller glaciers that make up the bulk of Greenland’s calving outlets, the story is more nuanced. Mélange buttressing isn’t a simple on/off switch. It depends on whether the icebergs are bonded together by landfast sea ice, and even then, the effect is modest. Surface melt and glacier dynamics seem to matter more and these are all inter-realted processes, typically the air temperature gets warmer, the ice surface starts to melt, the glacier starts to accelerate and the sea ice gets weaker and thinner all at the same time. We have confounding variables which makes the picture difficult to disentangle.

We also hope the dataset we’ve collected — the in-situ buoy tracks, the satellite-derived calving fronts, the velocity comparisons — will be useful for other groups working on modelling mélange processes. There’s very little in situ data across seasons with this kind of temporal resolution, and we’d be delighted if others can use it to test and improve their models.

Some Criticisms… and what’s next?

We had a very excellent editor and really good reviewers who gave the paper a through filleting. You can see these online as the Cryosphere has open review. I thank them all for their good comments which certainly clarified the paper. The main criticism that may still be levelled is what about the melange thickness? Maybe these glaciers don’t see an effect because the melange is thin and weak? Well we do go into that in the paper. These are pretty representative glaciers for Greenland by any measure and perhaps the glaciologists view of melange processes is slightly skewed by all the studies at Jakobshavn/Sermeq Kujalleq and Helheim? However, when you stand in the melange zone, it becomes very clear just how heterogenous it is. The large icebergs make up a relatively small portion of the total area, so current models, using “melange thickness” as a tuning parameter are missing some subtlty, which probably turns out to be important in this subject area.

And there’ll definitely be more on melange dimensions and how that relates to buttressing, coming very soon!

UAV shot of a sea ice lead in the melange zone of Tracy glacier, 2023

Acknowledgements

This paper was led by Sofie Hedetoft and Olivia Bang Brinck, who share first authorship with me and who did the lion’s share of the analysis and making of the figures. It’s been a real pleasure working with them and we would certainly not have got very far the rest of the team: Andrea Gierisch and Steffen Malskær Olsen, who were fantastic field work colleagues and a great inspiration for the ideas in this paper, Martin Olesen and Nicolaj Hansen for climate and SMB insights, Anders Anker Bjørk for finding our marvellous students and offering great advice on ice velocioty products, Erik Loebel for the automated calving front analysis, Anne Solgaard for the satellite data processing and assistance in interpretation and Peter Thejll whose expertise in statistics and spectral analysis is unrivalled.

As ever, none of this would have been possible without the local community in Qaanaaq — the hunters and fishers who guided us, transported us by dog sled, helped install instruments and recovered our buoys by boat when the ice broke up. Our DMI colleague Aksel Ascanius, who lives and works in Qaanaaq, has been an essential part of the programme throughout.

The work was carried out under the auspices of the Danish National Centre for Climate Research (NCKF), funded by the Danish Government, with additional contributions from EU Horizon Europe frameworks and ESA’s Climate Change Initiative for the Greenland ice sheet.

The full paper is open access — please go and read it, and do get in touch if you have questions or comments. I’m always happy to hear from people, whether on here, on mastodon, or by email.

Hedetoft, S., Bang Brinck, O., Mottram, R., et al. (2026). Mélange, landfast sea ice, ice velocities: What controls seasonal calving rates in North West Greenland? The Cryosphere, 20, 5071–5098. https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-20-5071-2026

Greenland thoughts from Antarctica..

I’m in Antarctica and yet I have been getting contact from journalists because Greenland is all over the press at the moment for all the wrong reasons. It’s reasonable I think to worry about what the various deranged threats towards Greenland will mean for us all also outside of Greenland. But I also think about (and yes, worry) about the friends I’ve made in Greenland over the years. Let’s hope common sense prevails and we can step back from the brink, and concentrate on the really long term problems that we are still rapidly storing up for ourselves.

Greenland is also on my mind, not just because of geopolitics, but also because the Copernicus Climate service has just put out their annual global climate highlights* for 2025 report with some disturbing results from Antarctica.

A few months ago we had a paper published called the Greenlandification of Antarctica, in which we argue that the changes in the Antarctic cryosphere increasingly resemble those we have previously observed in Greenland and the Arctic. To see the future of Antarctica, look at Greenland.

It’s been a busy time preparing for fieldwork and I didn’t manage to write anything here about it at the time, but this few eye-opening figure rather supports some of our arguments.

In this graphic, the 2025 temperature over the Antarctic region was 1.06°C higher than the average between 1991 and 2020 (a temperature anomaly). This is actually higher than any other region except the Arctic, where the temperature anomaly was reported to be 1.37°C above the 30 year average (bear in mind also that between 1991 and 2020, the temperature was also much increasing, so we’re not comparing with a pre-industrial climate here). Polar amplification was predicted long ago and as those first experiments found, it also is seen more in the Arctic than the Antarctic – but these results are a first hint of the amplification that is perhaps appearing now and may come to stay in the Antarctic.

In our paper we show the figure below (many thanks to illustrator Jagoba Malumbres-Olarta for the fine work), which shows five different cryosphere properties that are changing: 1) shrinking sea ice, 2) glacier velocities that show a seasonal cycle (mostly detected on the peninsula so far, though there are indications that Totten glacier for example has some kind of seasonal cycle, possibly modulated by sea ice), 3) total ice sheet mass loss, 4) ice shelf area and 5) annual mean surface temperature. In virtually all, the changes look very similar between Greenland and Antarctica, but with the crucial difference that the speed of changes is so far faster and more advanced in Greenland.

From Mottram et al., 2025: The Greenlandification of Antarctica. Original caption:
a, Commonalities include decline in sea ice extent from 1980 to 2023², with notable step-like changes in both poles. b, Seasonal glacier velocities are shown for two representative marine terminating glaciers, Kangilernata Sermia in Greenland¹³ and Hotine Glacier on the AP⁹, both now displaying similar seasonal dynamics. c, Both ice sheets show an accelerating total mass loss measured by GRACE satellites⁸. d, Multi-sensor records of ice shelf area loss in Antarctica¹¹ show a steeper decline than Greenland⁷ as Arctic ice shelves were largely lost in the pre-satellite era. e, Satellite records of annual mean ice sheet surface (skin) temperature for 1982 to 2021 from radiation data in the CLARA-A2.1 record processed by OSISAF² over both ice sheets. Earth observation data allows us to generalize over the vast size and spatially varying trends of the ice sheets, where there is generally poor coverage of in situ data. Individual weather stations indicate warming trends in air temperatures over both ice sheets of ~0.61 °C per decade at the South Pole and ~1.7 °C per decade at Greenland coastal stations. Illustration by Jagoba Malumbres-Olarte

The latter surface temperature plot is not the same as the Copernicus 2m air temperature which is based on the ERA5 reanalysis (so a blending of computer model with observations from satellites, weather stations, balloons, ships, planes etc). In our paper we wanted to focus on the contribution that satellite data has brought as we simply have so few direct in situ observations, so we used skin or surface temperature which is measured from satellites. It’s a somewhat theoretical construct, imagine a very thin surface (hence skin) layer, where incoming and outgoing energy are summed up to give a temperature. This is calculated over both ice sheets and sea surface by our colleagues in the satellite group at DMI and this is the dataset we used here. Their results which stretch back to the 1980s show a slow upward trend in Antarctica and a steeper change in Greenland, the record stopped in 2021 in our paper but it actually shows an upward increase since and that’s also borne out by the Copernicus results. In climate and weather models we in fact first calculate the skin temperature and then back interpolate to 2m temperature, so the two are very closely related.

To check that the satellite skin temperature record was accurate, I also looked at some of the longer in situ records, the South pole station for example has a long record and shows a small increasing trend over the last 30 years or so (which also may be attributable to natural causes, it is hard to pick out the global warming trend). Analysis of the record also shows that it is largely due to decreasing cold extremes rather than necessarily higher warm extremes. Again, a pattern we also observe in the Arctic.

Shallow snow cores drilled near Wasa, the clear layers are refrozen surface melt that has percolated into the snow below the surface. I was genuinely not expecting to see these, and it’s not always captured in the satellite record either, so we clearly have work to do to explain some of these findings.

The analogy is not exact. As a continent, Antarctica is much further south than Greenland is to the north and it is much more insulated from warming by the circumpolar ocean than the Greenland ice sheet, sticking out in the middle of the Atlantic is. In a very real sense then, geography is destiny. Surface melt, which is also not nearly as common here in Antarctica mostly refreezes in the snowpack, whereas in the lower parts of Greenland it generally runs off and contributes directly to sea level rise. That has not yet become a major process in Antarctica, it’s still colder here and there is less surface melt for now, although from our own observations in the field, much more than I’d expected. Surface melt is definitely something we need to keep an eye on and some of our observations show how tricky that is, especially given disagreements between satellite sensors on this point .

But these are all details, the point is that Antarctica is also part of the global climate system and the same processes we’ve been observing for more than three decades in Greenland are now also starting to become apparent here too.

In one other respect Antarctica is becoming more similar to Greenland – it is becoming more contested. The Treaty that has governed Antarctica is vulnerable and subject to the same weakening of the global order that is now playing out in the North.

Let’s hope that geopolitics can settle down soon so that we can start to tackle the more serious and longer term crises coming down the line.

^{*I’m not sure “highlights” is quite the right word either – maybe “lowlights” would be better, but then it also starts to sound like a report on hairstyles…}

Settling in..

It’s been a good start to the field season, incredible competent logistics, great field equipment, super helpful colleagues and incredible food by the station cook. For the first time ever I suspect I’ll be putting on weight in the field. But everything also takes a lot longer in Antarctica so little in the way of actual scientific results to report yet. Nevertheless we’ve some tantalising hints of some interesting processes and we’ve been settling in to the expedition frame of mind.

We had a very good flight from Oslo, a small delay in Prague notwithstanding, very friendly cabin crew and 3 seats each to lie across meant a relatively good sleep and a decent amount of work finalised on route.

Clouds over Namibia’s Etosha National Park. We basically crossed a third of the world to get here. A carbon debt I’ll be paying for years…

Similarly, in Cape Town, mostly spent in a hotel room finishing off reports, except for dinner and an occasional walk. And then a very smooth and easy 5 hour flight first to Troll, to be met by welcoming Norwegian colleagues and a vintage Basler (a DC3 airframe dating back to 1944, but with new engines – I’ve seen it in Greenland before – it still works!), that took us more or less directly to Wasa, where our Swedish colleagues met us on the glacier runway. And what a welcome! Everyone has been extremely helpful and very friendly.

The “vintage” Basler, an unpressurized aircraft. Very fun to fly in and beautiful views..

Operating in Antarctica is a bit like working in Greenland and also not at all like Greenland. In both places you have to be pretty flexible, self reliant and able to work in difficult conditions and across broad teams. It’s just much more extreme in terms of isolation, logistics, costs and everything else here in Antarctica.

The nunataks of Dronning Maud Land: it’s a big and very beautiful place

We are extremely fortunate to be so well- supported by such a great crew and it is important to me that we repay that investment with some excellent science results.

So far though, we’ve been laying the groundwork, getting our safety training done, testing some new coring equipment, unpacking and testing the LISA box and learning how to use the arks (a kind of plastic shell on skis that we will use for camping in while out of the station) and preparing for what I believe is sometimes called “deep field” (perhaps a touch melodramatic for what is basically camping).

Safety training: testing a snow anchor for crevasse rescue purposes

We’ve also tested some new drilling equipment, finding some very interesting firn features in the process, including several thick ice lenses in a region we didn’t expect.

There have been a few anxious moments around our old friend LISA. She is a complex machine with many pieces that can go wrong but finally at 9.30 this evening Clément managed to get her working. In a tiny “lab” but one with a great view. A huge relief all round (and hopefully field operation will be more straightforward now we’ve had some practice).

Tomorrow will be mostly packing up and preparation for a few days away, so Christmas Eve will likely find us camping out on a glacier somewhere working away. Weather permitting of course. So far we’ve been pretty lucky with that and we need to make the most of it while it lasts.

So that was a quick field update, it’s been pretty busy and a bit weird to think I’ve only been here 3 days so far. I’ve already slipped into field mode and slightly lost track of time.

The next update will probably be after Christmas, but I’m posting pictures as we go along to my pixelfed account. There are also some nice entries on the official iQ2300 expedition blog.

Freshwater Writing

It’s always nice to kick off a week with notification that a paper you have co-authored has been published.

In this case, and due to a magnificent effort by lead author Gavin Schmidt (who heaven knows must have many other things on his plate at NASA GISS right now), the” Datasets and protocols for including anomalous freshwater from melting ice sheets in climate simulations ” is now out in Geoscientific Model Development.

If that sounds a bit clunky, well it is. The idea is that the paper is a technical guidance, to help climate models (specifically for CMIP7), to include the effects of ice sheets into the earth system, without having to actually include a full ice sheet model, which turns out to be quite hard, particularly in Antarctica.

Even so there’s a lot of general interest in the paper, including how this is usually done now (there are a range of different approaches, each with their quirks). And then a particularly nice and clear section is given on all the many different ways that ice sheets lose ice. The figure below from the paper shows some of these and as they all have different downstream effects on ocean circulation, sea ice and of course sea level rise, it’s important to work out how to include them efficiently. The paper as it stands is a really nice introduction to the subject.

Figure 1 from Schmidt et al., 2025 showing a schematic of how ice sheets lose ice.

Icebergs are particularly interesting as a source, as the meltwater from these can take years to be added to the ocean, in which time, they will have drifted hundreds or thousands of kilometres. We have some suggestions on those too.

In any case, we hope this paper, which grew out of a technical online workshop on the subject, partly organised by our Ocean Ice project, will turn out to be a useful source for the groups that actually run the global climate models for CMIP and the IPCC. Many of these models are still in development or being initialised now, so time is already short for those of us involved in the technical parts of the exercise. The publishing process is slow, but this is also why preprints are so valuable. This paper in its submitted form has been up for months, it’s only now the final version is ready, but it hasn’t changed much. While it feels hard enough keeping up with published papers that preprints feel like a distraction, science is moving so fast, it’s probably essential. Maybe I’ll write more about that later. Of course preprints (and indeed published papers) can lead you astray, especially in fields you don’t know much about (as COVID was a helpful reminder), so perhaps sensibly the IPCC insists on acceptance of manuscripts before including them in their reports. Nonetheless, keeping up with preprints is now probably almost as important for scientists as keeping up with the published literature.

On the subject of the IPCC, I was reminded this weekend that it’s now less than 500 days until the submission deadline for the working group 1 part of the next IPCC report (AR7), so it’s time to start thinking about what are the priorities to get into the scientific literature to inform this effort. IPCC can only report published work, and doesn’t do its own, so now is the moment to pull out that unfinished but crucial piece of evidence of something or other relevant and get it submitted.

Not coincidentally, it’s time to talk about Academic Writing Month (AcWriMo). I actually try to write all through the year but November is time for a final push to try and meet my (usually far too ambitious) annual goals.

I had intended to start AcWriMo again this year, I’ve a huge backlog of papers to get done and it seemed a good way to start. However, a big proposal writing effort (more on here if the funding comes through) and a Hackathon (of which more also anon), both extremely rewarding and in fact also involving a lot of writing, somewhat derailed the first 10 days of my effort…

Now however it is time to focus on the remaining almost 3 weeks of November. The plan is one hour per day, except weekends, just focused on papers. I’ve put it in my calendar already. Let’s see if I can stretch more than that. Also non- negotiable is daily exercise. The fresh air and time away from the computer is almost as important as sitting down to do the work.

I’ve got an almost done experimental protocol to write for the PolarRES project (which finishes his month, so there’d be a nice symmetry to getting that done). And then there’s the much delayed reply to reviewers on our ice mélange study in NW Greenland as my main foci, but I also want to help my Hackathon group get their project knocked into shape, so some time will be spent there.

I’ve also got various diverse co-authored papers I need to contribute to, read,edit and give my options on. I hate to become a roadblock for colleagues so that also needs some attention but I’m for sure already out of time.

So if you want to see all stages of the sausage being made, follow along with the hashtag (#AcWriMo25) on socials, but hopefully you won’t see me there much because I #amwriting.

PROTECT: The Sea Level Rise Question

There is currently some discussion in the Danish media about sea level rise hazards and the risk of rapid changes that may or may not be on the horizon. Some of the discussion is about IPCC estimates. That’s a little unfortunate and in fact a bit unfair as the IPCC report has not been updated since 2021, nor was it intended to have been. In the mean time there has been a lot of additional science to clear up some of the ambiguities and questions left from the last report.

I’ve been working quite a bit on the cryosphere part of the sea level question of late, so thought I’d share some insights from the latest research into the debate at this point. And I have a pretty specific viewpoint here, because I’ve been working with the datasets, models, climate outputs etc that will likely go into the next IPCC report as part of a couple of EU funded projects. As part of that, we have prepared a policy briefing that will be presented to the European Parliament in June this year, but it’s already online now and will no doubt cross your socials later this week. I’m going to put in some highlights into this post too.

Now, I want to be really clear that everything I say in this post can be backed up with peer reviewed science, most of which has been published in the last 2 to 3 years. Let’s start with the summary:.:

The sea is rising. And the rate of rise is currently accelerating.
The sea will continue to rise long into the future. The rate of that sea level rise is largely in our society’s hands, given that it is strongly related to greenhouse gas emissions.
We have already committed to at least 2m of sea level rise by 2300.
By the end of 2100 most small glaciers and ice caps will be gone, mountain glaciers will contribute 20-24% of total sea-level rise under varying emission scenarios.
Antarctic and Greenland ice sheet mass loss will contribute significantly to sea-level rise for centuries, even under low emissions scenarios
Abrupt sea level rise on the order of metres in a few decades is not credible given new understanding of key ice fracture and iceberg calving processes.
By the end of this century we expect on the order of a half to one metre of sea level rise around Denmark, depending on emissions pathway. (If you want to get really specific: the low-likelihood high impact sea level rise scenario corresponds to about 0.9 m (on average), or at the 83rd percentile, about 1.6 m of sea level rise).
Your local sea level rise is not the same as the global average and some areas, primarily those at lower latitudes will experience higher total sea level rise and earlier than in regions at higher latitudes.
We have created a local sea level rise tool. You should still check your local coastal services provider, they will certainly have something tailor made for your local coastline (or they *should*!), but for something more updated than the IPCC, with latest SLR data, this is the one to check.

Sea level rise now is ~5mm per year averaged over the last 5 years, 10 years ago it was about 3 mm per year). Much of that sea level rise comes from melting ice, particularly the small glaciers and ice caps that are melting very fast indeed right now. Even under lower levels of emissions, those losses will increase. There won’t be many left by the end of this century.

Greenland is the largest single contributor and adds just less than a millimetre of sea level rise per year, with Antarctica contributing around a third of Greenland, primarily from the Amundsen Sea sector. The remaining sea level rise comes from thermal expansion of the oceans. Our work shows very clearly that the emissions pathway we follow as a human society will determine the ultimate sea level rise, but also how fast that will be achieved. The less we burn, the lower and slower the rise. But even under a low-end Paris scenario, we expect around 1 metre of sea level by 2300.

The long tail of sea level rise will come from Antarctica, where the ocean is accelerating melt of, in particular, West Antarctica. However, our recent work and that of other ice sheet groups shows that the risk of multi-metre sea level rise within a few decades is unrealistic. Again, to be very clear: We can’t rule out multiple metres of sea level rise, but it will happen on a timescale of centuries rather than years. High emissions pathways make multiple metres of sea level rise more likely. In fact, our results show that even under low emissions pathways, we may still be committed to losing some parts of especially West Antarctica, but it will still take a long-time for the Antarctic ice sheet to disintegrate. We have time to prepare our coastlines.

Greenland is losing ice much faster than Antarctica, and here atmospheric processes and firn and snow are more important than the ocean and these are also where the læarge uncertainties are. As I’ve written about before, that protective layer of compressed snow and ice will determine how quickly Greenland melts, as it is lost, the ice sheet will accelerate it’s contribution to sea level. This is a process that is included in our estimates.

There’s so much more I could write, but that’s supposed to be the high level summary. Feel free to shoot me questions in the comment feeds. I’ll do my best to answer them.

Five years ago, a small group of European scientists got together to do something really ambitious: work out how quickly and how far the sea will rise, both locally and on average worldwide, from the melting of glaciers and ice sheets. The PROTECT project was the first EU funded project in 10 years to really grapple with the state-of-the-art in ice sheet and glacier melt and the implications for sea level rise and to really seek to understand what is the problem, what are the uncertainties, what can we do about it.

We were and are a group of climate scientists, glaciologists, remote sensors, ice sheet modellers, atmospheric and ocean physicists, professors, statisticians, students, coastal adaptation specialists, social scientists and geodesists, stakeholders and policymakers. We’ve produced more than 155 scientific papers in the last 5 years (with more on the way) and now our findings are summarised in our new policy briefing for the European Parliament.

It’s been a formative, exhilarating and occasionally tough experience doing big science in the Horizon 2020 framework, but we’ve genuinely made some big steps forward, including new estimates of rates of ice sheet and glacier loss, a better understanding of some key processes, particularly calving and the influence of the ocean on the loss of ice shelves. More importantly for human societies, by integrating the social scientists into the project, we have had a very clear focus on how to consider sea level rise, not just as a scientific ice sheet process problem, but also how to integrate the findings into usable and workable information. In Denmark, we will start to use these inputs already in updating the Danish Climate Atlas. If you are elsewhere in the world, you may want to check out our sea level rise tool, that shows how the emissions pathway we follow, will affect your local sea level rise.

Our final recommendations?

Accelerate emission reductions to follow the lower emission scenario to limit
cryosphere loss and associated sea-level rise
Enhance monitoring of glaciers and ice sheets to refine models and predictions
Support the long-term development of ice sheet models, their integration into
climate models, and the coupling of glacier models with hydrological models, while
promoting education and training to build expertise in these areas
Invest in flexible and localized coastal management that incorporates
uncertainty and long-term projections
Foster international collaboration to share knowledge, resources, and strategies
for mitigating and adapting to global impacts

Small differences that make a really big difference.

I’m a co-author on a new paper that has just come out in GRL. It’s based on simulations we did with our collaborators in the PROTECT project on sea level contributions from the cryosphere. What Glaude et al shows is that, to quote the first of the 3 key points:

“With identical forcing, Greenland Ice Sheet surface mass balance from 3 regional climate models shows a two-fold difference by 2100”

In perhaps more familiar terms, if you run 3 regional climate models (that is a climate model run only over a small part of the world, in this case Greenland) with identical data feeding in from the same global climate model around the edges, you will get 3 quite different futures. Below you can see how the 3 different models think the ice sheet will look on average between 2080 and 2100. The model on the right, HIRHAM5 is our old and now retired RCM. It has a much smaller accumulation area left by the end of the century than the other two, which have much more intense melt going on in the margins.

Greenland Ice Sheet annual surface mass balance (a, b, c, 2080–2099 average) and annual surface mass balance anomaly (d, e, f, 2080–2099 average relative to 1980–1999) [mm WE/yr]. From left to right, RACMO (a and d), MAR (b and e), and HIRHAM (c and f). The equilibrium line (SMB = 0) is displayed as a solid black line in (d-f). Glaude et al., 2024, GRL.

In fact, by the end of the century, although the maps above seem to show HIRHAM having much more melt, there is in fact more runoff from the MAR model, because of this intense melt.

Spatially aggregated annual GrIS SMB anomalies (a), total precipitation (PP, b), and runoff (RU, c) [Gt/yr]. The solid lines represent the anomalies using a 5-year moving average, while the transparent lines display the unfiltered model output.

The surface mass balance (SMB) at the present day is in fact positive. This often surprises people, but SMB as the name suggests, only describes surface processes. Ice sheets can (and do) also lose a lot of ice by calving and subglacial and submarine melt. As SMB should balance everything if a glacier is to remain stable or even grow, present day SMB is usually 300 to 400 GT positive at the end of each year, and even so the Greenland ice sheet loses, net around 270Gt per year.

Our work here shows that, at least under this pathway, not only does SMB become net negative in itself by the middle of this century, there are significant differences in SMB projections between the estimates of how negative it will be, between the three RCMs. The global model we used, CESM2 under the high-end SSP5-8.5 scenario, is famously a warm scenario, but our estimated end of the century SMBs are extraordinary : (−964, −1735, and −1698 Gt per year, respectively, for 2080–2099). As I’ve discussed previously, one gigatonne is a cubic kilometre of water, 360Gt is roughly 1mm global mean sea level rise. (Though note your local sea level rise is *definitely* not the same as global average!) Even the lowest estimate here the is giving around 3 mm of global average sea level rise from surface melt and runoff *alone* by the end of this century each year. That’s pretty close to the modern day observed sea level rise from all sources.

And this is in spite of the fact that at the present day, the 3 models are rather similar in their estimates of SMB. The Devil is as usual in the details.

We attribute these startling divergences in the end of the century results to small differences in 1) the way melt water is generated, due to the albedo scheme (that is how the ice sheet surface reflects incoming energy); 2) but also due to the cloud parameters that control long-wave radiation at the surface, which again can promote or suppress melting. (We really need to know how much liquid water or ice there are in clouds, as this paper also emphasises in Antarctica); and 3) mainly down to the way liquid water that percolates down from the surface is handled in the snow pack. That is, how much air there is in the snowpack, how warm the snow is and how much refreezing can occur to buffer that melt.

The problem is that all of these processes happen at very small scales, from the mm (snow grains and air content), to the micron scale (cloud microphysics). That means that even in high (~5km) resolution regional models, we need to use parameterisations (approximations that generalise small scale processes over larger spatial and/or time scales). Small differences between these parameterisations add up over many decades. Essentially, much like the famous butterfly flapping its wings in Panama and causing a hurricane in Florida, the way mixed phase clouds produce a mix of water vapour and ice over an ice surface might ultimately determine how fast Miami will sink beneath the waves.

More data would certainly help to refine these parameterisations. The main scheme to work out how much liquid can percolate into snow was originally based on work by the US Army engineers in the 1970s. More field data with different types of snow would surely help refine these. Satellite data will be massively helpful, if we can smoothe out some wrinkles in how clouds (there they are again) affect surface reflectivity.

These 3 different types of processes also interact with each other in quite complex ways and ultimately affect how much runoff is generated as well as the size of the runoff zone in each model. So integration of many different types of observations is crucial.

“Different runoff projections stem from substantial discrepancies in projected ablation zone expansion, and reciprocally” as we put it in Glaude et al., 2024.

The timing and magnitude of the expansion of the runoff zone is quite different between the models, but all of them show a very consistent increase in melt and runoff over the next 80 years.

It’s probably also important to understand a couple of key points:

Firstly we ran a very high emissions pathway: SSP5-85 is probably not representative of the path we will follow in emissions (at least I hope not), but in this study we wanted to address the spread on different model estimates. And this is a way to get a good check on the sensitivity.

Secondly, the ice sheet mask and topography in these runs is kept fixed all the way through the century. This means we do not account for any elevation feedbacks (as the ice sheet gets lower because of melt, a larger area becomes vulnerable to melt because it’s lower and thus warmer), but we also don’t account for ice that has basically melted away no longer contributing to calculated runoff later in the century. Ice sheet dynamics are also not factored in.

Finally, we ran different resolution models, and that can have an impact particularly on precipitation and is one of the reasons why the new models we developed and have run in PolarRES (and which are now being analysed), have used a much more consistent set-up.

The 3 models we used, MAR, RACMO and HIRHAM have all been used in many different studies over both Greenland and Antarctica, but we haven’t really done a systematic comparison of future projections before. I think this work shows we need to get better at doing this to capture the uncertainty in the spread, especially when you consider that we’re now looking at using these models as training datasets for AI applications: training on each one of these models would give quite different results long-term. We need to think about how to both improve numerical models and capture that spread better. But ultimately, it’s how fast we can reduce greenhouse gas emissions and bend the carbon dioxide curve down that will determine how much of Greenland we will lose, and how quickly.

All data and model output from these simulations is available to download on our servers (we’re transitioning to a new one download.dmi.dk, not everything has been moved there yet). We also of course have data over land points and the surrounding seas, and we’ve run many more global climate models through the regional system to get high resolution (5km!) climate data also looking at different emissions pathways, if you’re interested in looking at, analysing or using any of this data – get in touch!

My warmest thanks to Quentin Glaude who led this analysis and special thanks to our colleagues in the Netherlands, France and Belgium for running these models and contributing to the paper analysis. Clearly, we have much work to do to get better at this ahead of CMIP7.

Group field trip the Greenland ice sheet: it’s important to see what you’re modelling actually looks like….

A Climate Atlas is discovered..

This post is in response to a thread posted on blue sky* by Jeremy Bassis and a discussion between Felicity mcCormack and Gavin Schmidt. All these people are well-respected climate scientists and the original thread was posted as a result of a Nature piece about operationalising climate models (and sea level rise), like we forecast the weather. This is something I’ve been thinking about for a while too, as sea level rise is an undeniable existential threat to my home country…

Anyway, I replied with a link to the Danish Climate Atlas – which to my mind is very much a model for how climate information should be done. I can’t give a full overview of the Climate Atlas, largely because it’s not my story to tell, but as Jeremy asked me to talk more in depth about it, and given the 300 character limit, I thought I’d formulate a few thoughts here first before sharing…

The climate atlas is not a book but a web frontpage that allows anyone with an internet connection to get high quality climate information at a local scale in Denmark. The map interface makes it easy and intuitive to use, and for detail a whole bunch of reports and datasets in different formats can be downloaded (everything from ASCII to GIS to netcdf). You can explore it here. All the data is given on a kommune (local authority) level except for sea level rise data which is divided up by coastal stretches.

Example of a Climate atlas figure – this is the overview figure, each local authority area is clickable for local information

For audiences that just want a quick message there are these easy to interpret icons with a key message below, like this one about higher water levels.

I was involved in the early stages and to my mind there are 4 crucial elements that have made it very successful:

Legal Requirement: Every local authority (a kommune, don’t think hippies, think regional councils) in Denmark has a legal obligation to make climate adaptation plans and to keep them updated. This element is important as it created awareness of the problem and effects of climate change and the necessity of investigating adaptation options. The initial plans were rather patchy and not very consistent with each other. Many regions had employed a consultant who was also maybe not an expert. Several kommune ended up with data based on CMIP resolution data! Hardly appropriate for a small local region in Denmark (which is barely resolved in most global climate models).
Data Foundation: At the same time we have been dynamically downscaling these simulations for decades, to provide really high quality locally bias corrected data (using also DMI’s long climatological time series to understand if and where biases exist). Colleagues at DMI identified a need to provide this in an easy to use format to everyone in the country. We had long ago discovered that working with motivated kommune employees led to a really good outcome: readable climate variables that are meaningful to an individual city, data formats that can be used by non-scienists (who definitely can’t deal with netCDFs).
Funding: Doing a data project properly requires money. The Climate Atlas is, compared to the cost of not doing anything, extremely cheap, nonetheless, it still costs something. Ear marked funding from the danish state to build up the Climate Atlas from the ground, to develop it as new needs are identified and to improve both communication and presentation has been crucial. Along the way several different needs have arisen (droughts, deep uncertainty in sea level rise), a new version will hopefully be coming soon.
Intense engagement: Probably the most crucial aspect to getting the climate atlas off the ground and into use has been communication over and over and over again. Not just initially with kommune to find out what they need (building on many years of background experience first), but also reaching out to special interest groups raning from local farmers in mid-west Jylland to sewage engineers, high school teachers and property developers. This continues, but has undeniably been helped by Denmark’s open trusting society and generous tradition of cultural meetings, continuing education and festivals.

The climate atlas in Denmark is the example I know best, we should be rightly proud of the team that constructed, maintain and continue to develop it. Other countries certainly have similar products in the Nordic and Blatic countries, and likely elsewhere, a network meets annually within the region to discuss developments etc. After a coincidental meeting, DMI was also invited to help develop one for Ghana, which is ongoing, and of course, will have completely different needs and requirements, However, the decision early one to base the back end of the Climate Atlas on open tools: python, cdo, github and CORDEX simulations, makes a lot of the learnings transferable.

If you want to know more, contact my colleagues at the Klima Atlas! I’m happy to put you in touch..

*As an aside, it’s interesting how many of the climate science and policy community have moved over to Blue Sky. It was rather quiet for a while but activity seems to have picked up. I’m not abandoning mastodon, which I actually prefer, but I’m happy to see an alternative to what has become known as Birdchan. I’d urge you to try it if you’re interested in a social media presence in a slightly more appealing environment. There are a number of handy tools, including fedica, that allow you to crosspost to multiple channels at the same time (including X, mastodon, bsky, TikTok and threads) and I’m also using the OpenVibe app, which has a common timeline from multiple platforms.

Breaking up is hard to do…

Way back in the mists of time, that is, early April, I and colleagues deployed some instruments on the sea ice in front of a number of glaciers in Northern Greenland, which I wrote a little bit about here.

Since then I’ve mostly been letting them get on with reporting their data back and occasionally checking on the satellite imagery to see how it’s looking in their surroundings.

It was about -30C and very cold when I left them out, so it’s sometimes quite hard to visualise just how much things will change over only a few months and to remember that at some point, they’ll need collecting

After a fairly melty start (yes, that is actually a technical term) to July, particularly in the northern part of the ice sheet (which you can see on the polarportal, see also below right) it’s time to start anticipating their collection.

We have a lot of advantages when it comes to coordinating this kind of project now, compared to the bad old days when imagery and communication were both scarce and expensive

For starters, there is Sentinel Hub’s EO browser, a course in which should be a requirement for every earth science adjacent subject in my opinion. EO Browser produces superb pre-processed imagery for free, such as this one, from the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-2 satellite yesterday

As you can see, the sea ice is still there but fracturing and patches of open water (in blue green) are now becoming visible.

Sentinel 2 satellite image processed on EO browser showing sea ice and ice bergs in front of Tracy and Farquhar glaciers.

If you’re out and about and only have your phone, there is also the excellent snapplanet.io app on your smartphone, with which you can create instagram ready snapshots of the planet or even animated gifs, with high resolution imagery a link away…

Now that’s what I call a fun social media* application…

Animated gif of satellite images showing the front of Heilprin glacier with icebergs and landfast sea ice.

Anyway, back to the break up. Every year, the sea ice forms in the fjord from October/November onwards, by December it’s often thick enough to travel on and then from April it starts to thin and melt and by late June large cracks are starting to form, allowing the surface meltwater to drain through. For a look at what happens if you get a large amount of melt from, say, a foehn wind, before the cracks start to open up, see this iconic photo taken by my colleague Steffen Olsen in 2019.

An extremely rare event, that nevertheless went viral

The other advantage we have working in this fjord is our collaboration with the local hunters and fishers. In winter they use dog sleds for hunting and accessing fishing sites, and to take us and our equipment out on to the ice. In summer, they are primarily using boats for fishing, hunting narwhal and, hopefully, collecting our equipment! Our brilliant DMI colleague Aksel who lives and works in the local settlement is also a huge help in assisting with communication and generally being able to get hold of things and people when asked.

We offer a reward for each buoy that is found and brought back to our base in Qaanaaq, so many of them in fact make their own way home. But we also work with our friends on a kind of remote treasure hunt, challenge Anneka style, with someone at home watching their positions come in via the satellite transmissions and sending updated information via sms to an iridium phone to the hunters on the boat…

I’m told it’s tremendous fun, with sharp eyes required, as even a bright orange plastic globe can be challenging to spot.

A floating trusted buoy in 2022.

I’ve never participated in this treasure hunt myself sadly, on land we generally see something like a spaghetti of arrows and spots via the Trusted global web api:

GPS positions from a trusted buoy.

We then have to try and superimpose these movements on the latest satellite images to work out if the buoy is floating or not, and then check to see if there is sufficient open water for a collection. Naturally working with local knowledge for this part is also absolutely vital.

The latest satellite images look like the ice has already broken up into large flakes close to Qaanaaq. I’ve annotated the Sentinel-1 image below as it is from a radar satellite that can see through clouds and the images can be a bit confusing if you’re not used to looking at them.

The scale of the massive melt on the ice sheet from the last few days is clearly visible in the dark grey rim on the glaciers. The open sea water is black and the sea ice shows up as geometric greys. This one is downloaded from the automatic archive my colleagues at DMI maintain around the whole coast of Greenland. It can be a handy quick check too.

Annotated satellite image of Kangerlussuaq/Inglefield Bredning (Gulf of Inglefield) fjord. The orange box shows where our study glaciers are located.

So, although the ice is starting to break up it’s at the tricky stage where it’s far from navigable by dog sled and certainly too difficult for boats, so it’s not quite the time to send out hunting parties for GNSS buoys.

It also means that when I go on holiday next week, I will not be quite leaving all this behind. I and my colleague in this project will be monitoring the movements of the buoys and the satellite pictures, as well as relying on our friends in the local community to let us know how the ice is looking and if they can get out to rescue our brave little sensors.

In the mean time I have plenty of data to start analysing and writing up. As ever massive thanks to the people of Qaanaaq and my cool colleagues for putting up with me and our GPS buoys. We hope to submit our first paper pretty soon..

Hopefully I’ll soon be able to look at a map like this one to see where they are (note that the precision on these buoy positions isn’t great, probabaly because they were thenbeing stored in a metal container).

*Yes, I’m probably a nerd. I’m a lot of fun** at parties too though.

**For a given value of “fun”.

Icebergs of Ilulissat

Icebergs in Ilulissat drift around the bay, sometimes fast, sometimes slow, sometimes they don’t move at all. They are drenched in the beautiful but sometimes stark light of the polar day. It’s scientifically interesting to watch them and speculate on their past trajectory and their likely future. It’s also extremely beautiful.

I’m once more on my way north to Qaanaaq, but this time I’ve been lucky enough to be able to enjoy some days off in Ilulissat. It’s an astonishing beautiful place, famous for the icebergs that come pouring out of the Ilulissat ice fjord just round the corner.

Normally, we’re only in town for one night as we have to switch planes to get to our field sites and this requires an overnight stay so it has been brilliant to be able to use a little holiday here.

Panorama over the bay in Ilulissat on a sunny evening

I have been using the time to work on some papers and try to clear some of the back log of reports and emails, but there has at least been some time for a couple of hikes in the back country nearby. I could post several hundred photos of icebergs and other magnificent views, but I was struck by the movement of icebergs in the bay outside my window while I was working yesterday.

Sometimes the big bergs seemed to move more, sometimes they seem stuck. I wanted to check this so I set up a time lapse on my tablet in the window of the guest house I’m staying in overnight (bearing in mind it’s the Polar Day so doesn’t actually get dark). I think it actually ran out of power before covering the full six hours I set it up for, so I’m now trying a full day. However, it was enough to show my perception was basically right and I have come to the conclusion the changing movement is related to the tides.

You can see the full almost a minute long film at my peertube account below.

This is also a bit of an excuse to play around with video editing a little, in this case I’m trying out canva, and to advertise my peertube account @icesheets_climate on TILvids.com.

As I’ve alluded to before, I’m trying out the non-corporate social media fediverse and it’s actually quite fun, though the videos are a bit time-consuming so I’m not quite sure how regularly I will manage to post these on my channel, but the clue is in the name on what most of them are about I guess…

Another iceberg near Ilulissat, this time one we visited by boat…

But I have gratuitously many photos on my pixelfed account and no doubt more to come. I’m also planning some icebreaker shorts describing different elements of the environment that I’m working on. We’ll have to see how much time I have to actually get those finished, they typically take a while!

Of course, these are not just pretty pictures – I have a professional interest in icebergs – my PhD was about ice fracture and applying models of crevasse formation to describe a new parameterisation of calving. One of the projects I’m working on in northern Greenland, (funded by the danish state through the National Centre for Climate Research, NCKF) is also focused on calving processes, and specifically the role of ice melange in the system. In fact, one of the papers I’ve been working on this week analyses those iceberg related datasets. It’s immensely valuable and rare that I have the opportunity to be able to focus on the process in the field at the same time as writing the paper.

I have 2 more days in Ilulissat, so no doubt there will be more walks around town and more iceberg photos, but I have sent the iceberg paper back to my co-authors now, so it’s time to focus on a new paper – and the climate of the polar regions in the future.

Heading North again…

I’m lifting my head from the semi-organised chaos that is my office, my home office, our family basement and the office workshop to write a quick post. This might be for reasons of despairing procrastination.

The reason for the chaos is that fieldwork season has come round again and on Friday I and my DMI colleague Steffen will be off to Northern Greenland once again. I’ll try to post a few photos to pixelfed (and perhaps even Instagram, though I swore off Meta products after the Brexit fiasco).

Buoys with GNSS and iridium transmitters (designed and assembled for us by Trustedglobal) ready to be taken out and deployed on the sea ice in northern Greenland. DMI’s geophysical facility building in the background.

This year my focus is again on the melange zone and we’ll be placing our instruments out to record the break-up of the fast ice. I also hope to get time to establish a new snow measurement programme – which I partly piloted last year. However, we will only be 2 scientists instead of the team of 4 this year, so this may have to wait until the second fieldwork period we have planned in early June (when the sea ice starts to break up). We are fortunate indeed that the local hunters, who still live a semi-subsistence lifestyle, are both incredibly competent and helpful and willing and eager to help when we go out on fieldwork.

This photo and excerpt was part of my contribution to a display at the Ocean decade conference in Barcelona next week. Last year we tested an open science variant of the trusted buoys above known as an Open Met Buoy. It’s incredibly smart, and completely open. You can download full instructions and make it and programme it yourself, or , as I did, order them from the german labmaker company who specialise in building open science kit.

Last year was a test of concept, and noone was more astonished than I was that the final set up not only survived the ice break up and floated safely down the fjord, we also managed to retrieve them and I hope they are waiting patiently in Qaanaaq so I can reprogramme and redeploy this year.

I wrote this piece on our work last year, promising a whole load of posts I didn’t end up having time to write. Sadly even my lego scientists never got an update. So instead of promising a whole lot of new posts, let me know what you’d like to see and read about either in the comments here or on my mastodon feed, and I’ll try to make some time to answer one or two of them while we go.

The area we travel to is going through very rapid changes now – not just climatic and environmental, but, perhaps even higher impact, social and cultural. I am privileged to be abel to witness it and we try hard to leave as little impact as possible.

At this stage it’s hard to imagine I’ll ever be ready to leave, but the clock is ticking down..

The back story

The study site

What we did

What we found

Why does this matter?

Some Criticisms… and what’s next?

Acknowledgements

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