The climate in Svalbard is undergoing amplified change compared to the global mean, which has a strong impact on the climatic mass balance of glaciers and the state of seasonal snow in land areas. In this study we analyze a coupled energy balance–subsurface model dataset, which provides detailed information on distributed climatic mass balance, snow conditions, and runoff across Svalbard between 1957 and 2018.

Submarine melting (SM) has been discussed as potentially triggering the recently observed retreat at outlet glaciers in Greenland. How much it may contribute in terms of future sea level rise (SLR) has not been quantified yet. When accounting for SM in our experiments, SLR contribution of 12 outlet glaciers increases by over 3-fold until the year 2100 under RCP8.5. Scaling up from 12 to all of Greenland's outlet glaciers increases future SLR contribution of Greenland by 50 %.

Kangerlussuaq Glacier in Greenland retreated significantly in the early 2000s and typified the response of calving glaciers to climate change. Satellite images show that it has recently retreated even further. The current retreat follows the appearance of extremely warm surface waters on the continental shelf during the summer of 2016, which likely entered the fjord and caused the rigid mass of sea ice and icebergs, which normally inhibits calving, to melt and break up.

The warming of the Earth's climate system causes sea level rise. In Antarctica, ice streams flow into the sea and develop ice shelves. These are floating extensions of the ice streams. Ocean water melts these ice shelves. It has been proposed that a submarine wall could shield these ice shelves from the warm water. Our model simulation shows that the wall protects ice shelves. However, the warm water flows to neighboring ice shelves. There, enhanced melting reduces the effectiveness of the wall.

Light–absorbing particles (LAPs, e.g. dust or black carbon) in snow are a potent climate forcing agent. Their presence darkens the snow surface and leads to higher solar energy absorption. Several studies have quantified this radiative impact by assuming that LAPs were motionless in dry snow, without any clear evidence of this assumption. Using time–lapse X–ray tomography, we show that temperature gradient metamorphism of snow induces downward motion of LAPs, leading to self–cleaning of snow.

We take Urumqi Glacier No. 1 as an example and validate a long-range terrestrial laser scanner (TLS) as an efficient tool for monitoring annual and intra-annual mass balances, especially for inaccessible glacier areas where no glaciological measurements are available. The TLS has application potential for glacier mass-balance monitoring in China. For wide applications of the TLS, we can select some benchmark glaciers and use stable scan positions and in-situ-measured densities of snow–firn.

We froze salty solutions to examine where and how the brine is distributed within the ice by using an environmental scanning electron microscope. The structures are highly heterogeneous, consisting of almost pure ice intertwined with brine, which can form lamellae, veins, or pools on the surface. Considering various concentrations and methods for laboratory ice preparation, we determined how the freezing technique influences the microstructure of the brine on and in the ice.

We can learn how human activity altered atmospheric air from the interstitial air in the porous snow layer (firn) on top of glaciers. However, old firn air (> 55 years) was observed only at sites where surface temperatures and snow accumulation rates are very low, such as the South Pole. In this study, we report an unusually old firn air with CO₂ age of 93 years from Styx Glacier, near the Ross Sea coast in Antarctica. We hypothesize that the large snow density variations increase firn air ages.

Snow on sea ice is a fundamental climate variable. We propose a novel approach to estimate snow depth on sea ice from satellite microwave radiometer measurements at several frequencies using neural networks (NNs). We evaluate our results with airborne snow depth measurements and compare them to three other established snow depth algorithms. We show that our NN results agree better with the airborne data than the other algorithms. This is also advantageous for sea ice thickness calculation.

The capacitively coupled resistivity (CCR) method enables the determination of frequency-dependent electrical parameters of the subsurface. CCR is well suited for application in cryospheric areas because it provides logistical advantages regarding coupling on hard surfaces and highly resistive grounds. With our new spectral two-dimensional inversion, we can identify subsurface structures based on full spectral information. We show the first results of the inversion method on the field scale.

In this article, we look at how the Arctic sea ice cover, as a solid body, behaves on different temporal and spatial scales. We show that the numerical model neXtSIM uses a new approach to simulate the mechanics of sea ice and reproduce the characteristics of how sea ice deforms, as observed by satellite. We discuss the importance of this model performance in the context of simulating climate processes taking place in polar regions, like the exchange of energy between the ocean and atmosphere.

We provide a simple stress-based parameterization for cliff calving of ice sheets. According to the resulting increasing dependence of the calving rate on ice thickness, the parameterization might lead to a runaway ice loss in large parts of Greenland and Antarctica.

The ocean's influence on the retreat of Greenland's tidewater glaciers is a key factor determining future sea level. By considering observations of ~200 glaciers from 1960, we find a significant relationship between retreat and melting in the ocean. Projected forwards, this relationship estimates the future evolution of Greenland's tidewater glaciers and provides a practical and empirically validated way of representing ice–ocean interaction in large-scale models used to estimate sea level rise.

We use topographic maps from two radar remote-sensing missions to map surface elevation changes of the northern and southern Patagonian ice fields (NPI and SPI) for two epochs (2000–2012 and 2012–2016). We find a heterogeneous pattern of thinning within the ice fields and a varying temporal trend, which may be explained by complex interdependence between surface mass balance and effects of flow dynamics. The contribution to sea level rise amounts to 0.05 mm a⁻¹ for both ice fields for 2000–2016.