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George VI Sound

New study puts a figure on sea-level rise following Antarctic ice shelves’ collapse

  • Press release
  • 19 July 2018

An international team of scientists has shown how much sea level would rise if Larsen C and George VI, two Antarctic ice shelves at risk of collapse, were to break up. While Larsen C has received much attention due to the break-away of a trillion-tonne iceberg from it last summer, its collapse would contribute only a few millimetres to sea-level rise. The break-up of the smaller George VI Ice Shelf would have a much larger impact. The research is published today in the European Geosciences Union journal The Cryosphere.

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Archipelago Sea from a drone

New study: oxygen loss in the coastal Baltic Sea is “unprecedentedly severe”

  • Press release
  • 5 July 2018

The Baltic Sea is home to some of the world’s largest dead zones, areas of oxygen-starved waters where most marine animals can’t survive. But while parts of this sea have long suffered from low oxygen levels, a new study by a team in Finland and Germany shows that oxygen loss in coastal areas over the past century is unprecedented in the last 1500 years. The research is published today in the European Geosciences Union journal Biogeosciences.

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policynews1.PNG

Follow EU policy news on the EGU website

  • EGU news
  • 22 June 2018

A new section on the EGU policy pages summarises recent EU policy news and opportunities that are relevant to geoscientists. It includes recently passed legislation, EU funding opportunities and EU Commission consultations.

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Highlight articles

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Earth System Dynamics

Diurnal land surface energy balance partitioning estimated from the thermodynamic limit of a cold heat engine

Turbulent fluxes represent an efficient way to transport heat and moisture from the surface into the atmosphere. Due to their inherently highly complex nature, they are commonly described by semiempirical relationships. What we show here is that these fluxes can also be predicted by viewing them as the outcome of a heat engine that operates between the warm surface and the cooler atmosphere and that works at its limit.

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The Cryosphere

Stopping the flood: could we use targeted geoengineering to mitigate sea level rise?

In this paper, we explore the possibility of using locally targeted geoengineering to slow the rate of an ice sheet collapse. We find that an intervention as big as existing large civil engineering projects could have a 30 % probability of stopping an ice sheet collapse, while larger interventions have better odds of success. With more research to improve upon the simple designs we considered, it may be possible to perfect a design that was both achievable and had good odds of success.

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Biogeosciences

Tracing water masses with 129I and 236U in the subpolar North Atlantic along the GEOTRACES GA01 section

The investigation of water mass transport pathways and timescales is important to understand the global ocean circulation. Following earlier studies, we use artificial radionuclides introduced to the oceans in the 1950s to investigate the water transport in the subpolar North Atlantic (SPNA). For the first time, we combine measurements of the long-lived iodine-129 and uranium-236 to confirm earlier findings/hypotheses and to better understand shallow and deep ventilation processes in the SPNA.

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Geoscientific Model Development

sympl (v. 0.4.0) and climt (v. 0.15.3) – towards a flexible framework for building model hierarchies in Python

In the same way that the fruit fly or the yeast cell serve as model systems in biology, climate scientists use a range of computer models to gain a fundamental understanding of our climate system. These models range from extremely simple models that can run on your phone to those that require supercomputers. Sympl and climt are packages that make it easy for climate scientists to build a hierarchy of such models using Python, which facilitates easy to read and self-documenting models.

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Latest posts from EGU blogs

GeoPolicy: What does working at the European Environment Agency look like? An interview with Petra Fagerholm

This blog post features an interview with Petra Fagerholm who is currently leading the team on public relations and outreach in the communications department of the European Environment Agency (EEA). Petra gave a presentation about the EEA during the Science for Policy short course at the 2018 EGU General Assembly. In this interview, Petra describes her career path, what it is like to work at the EEA and provides some tips to scientists who are interested in a career in …

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Image of the Week - The 2018 Arctic summer sea ice season (a.k.a. how bad was it this year?)

Image of the Week - The 2018 Arctic summer sea ice season (a.k.a. how bad was it this year?)

With the equinox this Sunday, it is officially the end of summer in the Northern hemisphere and in particular the end of the melt season in the Arctic. These last years, it has typically been the time to write bad news about record low sea ice and the continuation of the dramatic decreasing trend (see this post on this blog). So, how bad has the 2018 melt season been for the Arctic? Yes, the 2018 summer Arctic sea ice was …

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The puzzle of high Arctic aerosols

The puzzle of high Arctic aerosols

Current Position: 86°24’ N, 13°29’E (17th September 2018) The Arctic Ocean 2018 Expedition drifted for 33 days in the high Arctic and is now heading back south to Tromsø, Norway. With continuous aerosol observations, we hope to be able to add new pieces to the high Arctic aerosol puzzle to create a more complete picture that can help us to improve our understanding of the surface energy budget in the region. In recent years, considerable efforts have been undertaken to …

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