Since 2015 temperature and salinity have been monitored in Hornsund fjord in southern Svalbard, where retreating glaciers add meltwater and terrestrial matter into coastal waters. Therefore turbidity and water sampling for suspended sediment concentration and sediment deposition are also included. The monitoring spans from May to October, enabling studies on seasonality and its variability over the years, and it covers the whole fjord including the inner basins in close proximity of glaciers.

The boundary between the ocean and the terminus of marine-terminating glaciers is under-explored, but holds the key to understanding many climate-change-induced processes. This region is too hazardous for humans to directly access, but unmanned robots can help us safely explore it. Here we present the design, development and deployment of a low-cost, modular, robust surface robotic system to study the near-terminus region, and improve our understanding of the climate-change mechanisms there.

Receding tidewater glaciers are important contributors to sea level rise. Understanding their dynamics and developing models for their attrition has become a matter of global concern. Long-term monitoring of glacier frontal ablation is very difficult. Here we show for the first time that calving fluxes can be estimated from the underwater sounds made by icebergs impacting the sea surface. This development has important application to understanding the response of glaciers to warming oceans.

Ice-nucleating particles (INPs) are rare aerosols that can trigger ice formation in clouds and affect climate-relevant cloud properties such as phase, reflectivity and lifetime. Dust is the dominant INP source, yet few measurements have been reported near major dust sources. We report INP observations within hundreds of kilometers of the biggest dust source regions globally: the Sahara and the Arabian Peninsula. Results show that at temperatures > −15 °C, INPs are dominated by organics.

Ice-nucleating particles (INPs) can influence multiple climate-relevant cloud properties by triggering droplet freezing at relative humidities below or temperatures above the freezing point of water. The ocean is a significant INP source; however, the specific identities of marine INPs remain largely unknown. Here, we identify 14 ice-nucleating microbes from aerosol and precipitation samples collected at a coastal site in southern California, two or more of which are likely marine.