Fibre-optics used to take the temperature of Greenland Ice Sheet

A research team, led by Dr Poul Christoffersen from the Scott Polar Research Institute, have used fibre-optic sensing to obtain the most detailed measurements of ice properties ever taken on the Greenland Ice Sheet. Their findings will be used to make more accurate models of the future movement of the world's second-largest ice sheet, as the effects of climate change continue to accelerate.

SPRI PhD candidate Rob Law is the lead author on a new paper about the work.

Read the full paper: Robert Law et al. 'Thermodynamics of a fast-moving Greenlandic outlet glacier revealed by fiber-optic distributed temperature sensing.' Science Advances (2021). doi:10.1126/sciadv.abe7136

SPRI Review 2020

SPRI Review 2020 is now available online. SPRI Review is the Annual Report issued by the Scott Polar Research Institute, giving information on the Institute's activities over the past year.

Professor Julian Dowdeswell

Professor Julian Dowdeswell retired from the Directorship of SPRI at Easter 2021, after almost 20 years in the post. He will remain as Professor of Physical Geography and a member of SPRI during a period of sabbatical leave prior to retirement from the University of Cambridge at the end of 2022.

During a career of over four decades, since his graduation from the Cambridge Geography Department in 1980, Julian has led or participated in more than 40 expeditions to the Arctic and Antarctic. His research, published in almost 400 papers, is centred in two main themes. The first concerns the patterns, processes and rates of glacial sedimentation on high-latitude continental margins, from fjords and continental shelves to the deep sea, and the record of past glacier and ice-sheet change found there. The second is the form and flow of modern glaciers and ice sheets, their sensitivity to climatic variations and the implications for global sea level.

Daughters of the Snow (BBC Sounds and Radio 4)

A BBC Sounds / Radio 4 program, "Daughters of the Snow", broadcast this week and available to listen online, featured Dr Michael Bravo.

This collaboration between Dr Bravo, radio producer Andrea Rangecroft, and the artist and poet Himali Singh Soin, explores the North Pole as a mythologised space in literature. Reading novels like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Arthur Conan Doyle's Captain of the Pole Star at school in India, the North Pole has often been portrayed as a blank, white, mysterious and uninhabited place. The conversations in this programme, set to music, discuss the consequences of mythologising this huge region of diverse lands and cultures at the top of the world.

Greenland Ice Sheet lakes drain in the winter

PhD student Corinne Benedek and supervisor Ian Willis have discovered that large lakes on the surface of the Greenland Ice Sheet drain in the Arctic winter. They used satellite radar images to identify large, anomalous, sudden and sustained increases in radar backscatter, showing a switch from a water to an ice surface.

It is known that lakes can drain catastrophically in the summer but this is the first time they have been seen to disappear in the winter.

Using other satellite data they confirmed the lake drainages, which show a lowering of the surface by several metres and the loss of up to 20 million cubic metres of water, the equivalent of around 8000 olympic size swimming pools emptying to the bottom of the ice sheet over a few days, possibly just a few hours.

The findings have implications for the speed at which the ice sheet flows to the ocean.

The work is discussed further on the University of Cambridge news pages and is published in The Cryosphere.