Antarctica

New findings will help scientists predict climate change impact on frozen continent

Project utilized 25 years of data from six international satellite missions

Antarctica and Greenland are dotted with automated weather stations, 30-foot metal tubes equipped with sensors to record temperature, atmospheric pressure, wind speed and other conditions. The outposts gather a lot of useful readings for scientists hoping to understand the transformation of polar environments brought on by climate change, but data formats vary from station to […]

A study by scientists from UCI and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory has revealed a gigantic cavity on the underside of Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica. The hole is reportedly two-thirds the area of Manhattan, about 1,000 feet tall and expanding. The findings were published today in Science Advances. The researchers expected to find gaps between […]

Climate change-induced melting will raise global sea levels for decades to come

Carbon Brief, a website devoted to the analysis of energy policy and climate change science, has published a list of the 10 climate research papers in 2018 that received the most global media attention, and two originated at UCI. The rankings are based on scores tabulated by Altmetric, which tracks and measures exposure of academic […]

To make better predictions about future wildfires around the world, climate scientists want to know the prevalence and intensity of past outbreaks. For a study published recently in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Melinda Nicewonger, a UCI graduate student in Earth system science, examined ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica to measure changes […]

Usually seen as less vulnerable, they carry the potential to add 16 feet to global sea level

UCI scientists are part of international team conducting 25-year assessment

Mathieu Morlighem, UCI assistant professor of Earth system science, is contributing his expertise in ice sheet numerical modeling to the newly launched International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration. The five-year, $25 million project, co-sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the U.K.’s Natural Environment Research Council, aims to provide answers to some of the most pressing inquiries […]