European Geosciences Union
Division on Cryospheric Sciences
President: Olaf Eisen (cr@egu.eu)
Deputy President: Carleen Tijm-Reijmer
(c.h.tijm-reijmer@uu.nl)
The Cryosphere are those parts of the Earth and other planetary bodies that are subject to prolonged periods of temperatures below the freezing point of water. These include glaciers, frozen ground, sea ice, snow and ice. One of the main aims of the EGU Division on Cryospheric Sciences is to facilitate the exchange of information within the science community. It does so by organizing series of sessions at the annual EGU assembly, and through the publishing of the open-access journal `The Cryosphere’. The division awards the Louis Agassiz medal for outstanding contributions to the science of the cryosphere.
The 2019 Louis Agassiz Medal is awarded to Andreas Kääb for innovative and multidisciplinary contributions to the field of remote sensing of the cryosphere, with applications in glacier mass balance, permafrost and geohazards.
The 2019 Outstanding Student Poster and PICO (OSPP) Awards is awarded to Bartosz Kurjanski Cool deltas – Sedimentary environments of the Salpausselka I and II moraine ridges near Lahti, Finland
The 2019 Outstanding Student Poster and PICO (OSPP) Awards is awarded to Gregory Church Detecting and characterising an englacial conduit network within a temperate Swiss glacier using active seismic and ground penetrating radar
The 2019 Arne Richter Awards for Outstanding Early Career Scientists is awarded to Marie Dumont for outstanding contributions to the field of snow sciences.
The Karthaus summer school on Glaciers and Ice Sheets in the Climate System has a long history of training many generations of PhD students, thus forming professional networks that have lasted throughout their careers. The Karthaus summer school has been described in detail in a previous Cryoblog post. Here we want to focus on the story of a glacier… Hochjochferner, a retreating glacier One of the highlights during each summer school is a one-day excursion to the Hochjochferner (Figure 1), …
Ice shelves (the floating parts of the Antarctic ice sheet) play a fundamental role in the stability of the Antarctic ice sheet (see this post) and, therefore, its contribution to global sea-level rise. They lose mass primarily through melting at their bases, which are in contact with the ocean. This thins them and makes them more vulnerable, reducing their stabilising potential and causing more ice to flow from the land into the ocean. Thanks to direct sub-shelf melt measurements collected …
Only a couple of days left until Santa Claus’ big night! Once again the beardy guy in the red and white suit will fly around the world with his sledge pulled by his strong reindeers to make young and old children happy! But how does he navigate in the dark? Luckily, nature provides some solutions, for example light pillars… Light pillars form when ice particles are suspended in the air. These particles can be found at high altitudes in the …
Recent work published in my department at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (GEUS) focused on solid ice discharge into the ocean from the Greenland Ice Sheet from 1986 to 2017 (Mankoff et al. 2019). Solid ice discharge is the ice that is lost from a glacier as it flows towards the coast and eventually breaks off as icebergs into the ocean (i.e. calving). Solid ice discharge is an important constraint for sea level rise predictions. Today, we use …
This month the EGU announced the results of the autumn 2019 elections, which included selecting the Union’s next President, General Secretary and Division Presidents. We also opened two calls for geoscience teachers: one to attend a GIFT workshop in March that will be held in conjunction with the 36th International Geological Congress in Delhi, India, and a second for university-level geoscience teachers to attend a teaching focus group meeting associated with the 2020 General Assembly.
Please remember that the deadline for abstracts for the General Assembly is 15 January 2020 at 13:00 CET. Before then, consider renewing your EGU membership to be part of Europe’s largest geosciences union. EGU members are eligible to submit an abstract to the General Assembly and enjoy substantially reduced meeting registration rates, among other benefits.
Applications are now open for the EGU General Assembly Mentoring Programme (deadline: 31 January 2020).