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North Atlantic Ice Melt May Increase the Storminess of the Northern Hemisphere

Featured image of sea ice from Free-Photos on Pixabay

Paper: Rapid Cooling and Increased Storminess Triggered by Freshwater in the North Atlantic
Authors: M. Oltmanns, J. Karstensen, G. W. K. Moore, and S. A. Josey

Way up north in the Arctic Circle, sea ice and glaciers are rapidly melting and sending a massive amount of cold, fresh water into the North Atlantic Ocean. At first this influx of cold water may seem beneficial to offset the warming from climate change, but new research suggests that this meltwater from Greenland and the Arctic increases the number of winter storms that occur in the Northern Hemisphere.

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Evidence of pollution all the way to the poles

Featured Image: Lake Hazen in front of the Grant Land Mountains – photo courtesy Kyra St. Pierre, a co-author of the Sun et al. paper.

Paper: Glacial melt inputs of organophosphate ester flame retardants to the largest High Arctic lake

Authors: Sun, Yuxin, Amilia O. De Silva, Kyra A. St Pierre, Derek C. G. Muir, Christine Spencer, Igor Lehnherr, John J. MacInnis

Far from human habitation Lake Hazen sits north of the Arctic Circle surrounded by pristine, treeless mountains. But even there, the telltale chemical fingerprints of human pollution can be found.

Spring and summer in the far North are a short three-month period of reawakening, glacial melt, and permafrost thaw. During these months, meltwater transports anything that has collected on top of glaciers, like particles, nutrients, and contaminants deposited from the atmosphere, flowing down rivers and into glacial lakes. 

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Do melting glaciers release extra sediment?

Featured image: Pitztal Glacier, Austria by annca on Pixabay

Paper: Increased Subglacial Sediment Discharge in a Warming Climate: Consideration of Ice Dynamics, Glacial Erosion, and Fluvial Sediment Transport
Authors: Ian Delaney and Surendra Adhikari

The world’s glaciers are shrinking, sending great quantities of water downstream in a geologic instant. But new research shows a lesser-known effect of climate warming: a large increase in sediment released from melting glaciers that might rearrange the shape of Earth’s surface. Continue reading “Do melting glaciers release extra sediment?”