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Ice might be ubiquitous, but we are still discovering things about it

Earth

Ice might be ubiquitous, but we are still discovering things about it

Once seen as miraculous, these days ice is no longer extraordinary. But in a winter season when Antarctic sea ice hit a historic low, it is clear we should cherish it more, says Max Leonard

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Physics

Springy ice seen for the first time may explain how clouds make rain

News

Environment

Ozone layer treaty pushed back ice-free Arctic summers up to 15 years

News

The ice sheet near Pituffik, Greenland

Earth

Next 10,000 years of Greenland ice sheet could be decided this century

News

Icefin under Antarctica’s Thwaites ice shelf

Video

Melt rate of Antarctic 'doomsday glacier' slowed by freshwater layer

Video

Part of the setup for creating medium density amorphous ice

Physics

Entirely new type of ice made using extremely cold steel balls

News

Satellite image of Jakobshavn glacier,

Environment

Engineering firms explore plan to slow melting of Greenland glacier

News

Original Caption Released with Image: The puzzling, fascinating surface of Jupiter's icy moon Europa looms large in this newly-reprocessed color view, made from images taken by NASA's Galileo spacecraft in the late 1990s. This is the color view of Europa from Galileo that shows the largest portion of the moon's surface at the highest resolution. The view was previously released as a mosaic with lower resolution and strongly enhanced color (see PIA02590). To create this new version, the images were assembled into a realistic color view of the surface that approximates how Europa would appear to the human eye. The scene shows the stunning diversity of Europa's surface geology. Long, linear cracks and ridges crisscross the surface, interrupted by regions of disrupted terrain where the surface ice crust has been broken up and re-frozen into new patterns. Color variations across the surface are associated with differences in geologic feature type and location. For example, areas that appear blue or white contain relatively pure water ice, while reddish and brownish areas include non-ice components in higher concentrations. The polar regions, visible at the left and right of this view, are noticeably bluer than the more equatorial latitudes, which look more white. This color variation is thought to be due to differences in ice grain size in the two locations. Images taken through near-infrared, green and violet filters have been combined to produce this view. The images have been corrected for light scattered outside of the image, to provide a color correction that is calibrated by wavelength. Gaps in the images have been filled with simulated color based on the color of nearby surface areas with similar terrain types. This global color view consists of images acquired by the Galileo Solid-State Imaging (SSI) experiment on the spacecraft's first and fourteenth orbits through the Jupiter system, in 1995 and 1998, respectively. Image scale is 1 mile (1.6 kilometers) per pixel. North on Europa is at right. The Galileo mission was managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, for the agency's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena. Additional information about Galileo and its discoveries is available on the Galileo mission home page at http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/galileo/. More information about Europa is available at http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/europa. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SETI Institute

Space

Shards of pure ice might snow upwards beneath the ice shell of Europa

News

For the first time ever recorded, in the late summer of 2021, rain fell on the high central region of the Greenland ice sheet. This extraordinary event was followed by the surface snow and ice rapidly melting. Researchers discovered that it wasn?t the rain that caused the melt, it was unusually warm ?atmospheric rivers? that swept along Greenland, bringing potent melt conditions when the melt season would normally be drawing to a close. Thanks to detailed measurements from the network of automatic weather stations on the ice set up by the Department of Glaciology and Climate at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland coupled with measurements from the Copernicus Sentinel-3 satellites in space helped researchers understand the exact processes and dynamics of how the ice melts.

Environment

Feedback loop in Greenland amplified ice melt from warm weather

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A polar bear

Life

Polar bears adapting to climate change by hunting on freshwater ice

A group of several hundred polar bears in south-eastern Greenland often catch seals by waiting outside their prey's breathing holes on blocks of floating freshwater ice from glaciers, in an example of the animals adapting to a loss of sea ice driven by climate change

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Earth

Vast reservoir of water discovered under the ice in Antarctica

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Space

We now know how the mysterious ridges covering Europa’s surface formed

News

Video

RRS Sir David Attenborough completes ice trials in Antarctica

Video

Environment

Base of the Greenland ice sheet is melting faster than we thought

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