The European State of the Climate 2024 report, an annual report compiled by the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and implemented by ECMWF on behalf of the European Commission, has been released today, showing Europe to be the fastest-warming continent in what was the hottest year on record for Europe.
This year, the UK Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling (CPOM) contributed to the section on Trends in climate indicators.
The polar ice sheets, in Greenland and Antarctica, store a significant proportion of the Earth’s freshwater. When they melt, they contribute this freshwater to the oceans, not only increasing sea levels, but also affecting ocean circulation. Estimates of the Antarctic and Greenland Ice Sheets mass balance produced by IMBIE, an international collaboration of polar scientists led by CPOM and supported by the space agencies ESA and NASA, are used in this report’s key climate indicator on Ice Sheets.
Since the 1970s, there has been a recorded ice loss of:
Greenland ice sheet: 6776 km3
Antarctic ice sheet: 5253 km3
Please see Figure 19.3 on page 89 of the report.
This report also includes an overview of the different components of The cryosphere, including glaciers, sea ice, and ice sheets and how they interact with each other and the Earth’s wider environment, impacting the climate. CPOM is part of C3S (the Copernicus Climate Services) Cryosphere Service, which is led by ENVEO IT GmbH (https://www.enveo.at).
In 2024, we were very lucky to be able to catch up with women working in the field of Earth observation and modelling from across the world at the ESA/NASA Cryo2ice conference in Iceland.
Ahead of International Women’s Day 2025 coming up this Saturday, we gathered some of the perspectives shared with us on the importance of studying and understanding the Earth, what it’s like working in this area of science and why it’s important to share scientific understanding with the world- as well as encouraging words for women and girls thinking of pursuing a career in science.as well as encouraging words for women and girls thinking of pursuing a career in science.
Thank you to our interviewees for taking part in this video: CPOM Principal Investigator: Sea Ice Earth Observation, Rosemary Willatt (UCL), Anny Cazenave (LEGOS), CPOM Director for Knowledge Exchange, Sammie Buzzard (Northumbria University), Liza Wilson (University of Iceland/Fulbright Commission Iceland), Rachel Tilling (NASA), Bryony Freer (Scripps Institute of Oceanography) and Helen Fricker (Scripps Institute of Oceanography).
A special thanks must also go to the ESA and NASA Cryo2ice team, who facilitated many of the interviews included in this video.
It is said that Ernest Shackleton advertised ‘men wanted’ for ‘hazardous journey, small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger’ ahead of his 1914 Antarctic expedition which ended in the loss of his ship. Back then polar exploration and research was seen as an exclusively male occupation, even though women had been involved since as early as the 19th century. Women were often formally blocked from joining expeditions to the Arctic and Antarctic.
Times have certainly changed since then. During the last century intrepid and tenacious women led the way in shattering this ice ceiling. Fast forward more than a century after Shackleton’s infamous advert to 2025 and women scientists are participating in and leading field research projects across the cryosphere.
The UK Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling, brings together Earth Observation experts with modellers, to provide robust and accurate measurements of the Earth’s ice from the past and present, as well as projections for the future to help with world prepare for the changes a warming world might bring. Although we use satellite data in our work, Earth Observation often requires field-based observations to help verify satellite data, and so fieldwork is still an important piece of the puzzle when researching the polar regions, providing our scientists with wonderful opportunities to visit these incredible and rapidly changing environments.
DEFIANT (Drivers and Effects of Fluctuations in sea Ice in the ANTarctic) is a NERC project aimed at studying sea ice in the Southern Ocean and how it affects the wider climate system. CPOM’s Dr Inès Otosaka and Dr Isobel Lawrence and CPOM Director Professor Andrew Shepherd joined a fantastic team of scientists from BAS and DTU, to visit Antarctica to verify data collected on Antarctic sea ice by satellites.
Image credit: Professor Andrew Shepherd
Inès said (in this blog she wrote at the time) that ‘it was incredibly rewarding to see all the work that had been done over the months preceding the actual fieldwork come to fruition’. Although field work can be an exhausting experience, there was still time to enjoy the spectacular location with the team being ‘lucky enough to spot some penguins, seals, and even a pod of orcas.’
The team recorded this brilliant Iceworld podcast with BAS (British Antarctic Survey) – have a listen to their experiences on this incredible expedition.
Inès also joined Andrew Shepherd, PhD Researchers Amy Swiggs and Dr Anne Braakmann-Folgmann (former PhD Researcher) on the European Space Agency’s (ESA’s) Cryo2ice campaign to Greenland in 2022 where they collected ice cores, verified LiDAR measurements and collected snow depth measurements for snow density calculations. Amy wrote this blog about the fieldwork adventure, if you want to read more about this.
More recently in September 2024, Amy and Inès were also part of a CPOM team that visited Iceland to study proglacial lakes with a drone, alongside PhD Researcher Natasha Lee, CPOM Director for Knowledge Exchange Dr Sammie Buzzard, Andrew Shepherd, PhD Researcher, Nitin Ravinder and Data Scientist, Ben Palmer. We made this short film about this campaign, showing the team in action.
Image: CPOM PhD Researcher Natasha Lee, setting up a drone, on the Iceland Fieldwork campaign 2024.
Getting the opportunity to do fieldwork at an early career stage often draws people to polar science. For Dr Rosie Willatt (CPOM PI) the opportunity to visit Antarctica as a PhD student was a turning point in her career, and ultimately led to her becoming a polar scientist. You can hear more about how Rosie became a polar scientist in this video.
Sammie Buzzard, a glaciologist who started out studying maths, has been part of numerous fieldwork expeditions, including measuring glaciers in the Arctic during her PhD. She will soon be visiting the Antarctic in 2025.
She said “Although we are still far from gender equality within the polar sciences it’s fantastic to see opportunities becoming available to those of all genders that wouldn’t have been even during the earlier years of my lifetime”.
Image: CPOM’s Sammie Buzzard, preparing equipment on the Iceland Fieldwork Campaign, 2024.
These are just some of the examples of CPOM women scientists leading, and working on, these important fieldwork projects across the Arctic and Antarctica.
As we strive to understand these complex regions, how climate changes affect them and in turn how these changes will impact the rest of the planet in the years to come, it’s fantastic to see women scientists playing a vital role following the years of exclusion they experienced in previous centuries.
On Tuesday 12 November 2024, scientists from the UK Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling took part in STEM Learning’s Protecting our Planet Day 2024, a fantastic day of live-streamed sessions from experts on what is being done to protect our planet from space, and on Earth.
More than 150,000 people, including classrooms full of interested teachers and pupils, joined to learn more about climate change and how they can pursue a career in STEM.
PhD researcher, Robbie Mallett (UCL) attended COP27 in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, with the International Cryosphere Climate Initiative. During the conference he gave talks and appeared on panels in the Cryosphere Pavilion. As well as running the pavilion, the ICCI released the 2022 State of The Cryosphere Report, which Robbie helped to launch to the media and COP participants.
Robbie and the ICCI also campaigned for greater recognition of the cryosphere in COP negotiations. This year the cryosphere was specifically mentioned in the conference’s cover declaration for the first time, and the ICCI coordinated a new multinational coalition, named the Ambition on Melting Ice https://iccinet.org/ambition-on-melting-ice/
Congratulations to CPOM associate, Tamsin Edwards (KCL) who in 2023, will be on secondment as a new Parliamentary “Thematic Research Lead”: helping to provide evidence to Parliament on climate & environmental science.
Tamsin will each join new thematic policy hubs which will bring together staff from POST, the House of Commons Library and Select Committee teams, ensuring greater co-ordination and a better flow of research information through Parliament.
CPOM Director, Professor Andy Shepherd (University of Leeds) joined Simonetta Cheli, ESA’s Programmes and Head of ESRIN (ESA establishment in Italy) and co at the IAC2022 to discuss how ESA is preparing to address climate change. You can also watch Andy Shepherd answering how we raise awareness on climate change and what can scientists do?
“We need to tell people good news stories about climate recovery. There’s hope!”
Scientists monitoring the giant A68A Antarctic iceberg from space reveal that a huge amount of fresh water was released as it melted around the sub-Antarctic island of South Georgia.
Satellites revealed that 152 billion tonnes of fresh water entered the seas around the sub-Antarctic island of South Georgia when the megaberg A68A melted over 3 months in 2020/2021, according to a new study.
152 billion tonnes of water is equivalent to 20 times the amount of water in Loch Ness or 61 million Olympic sized swimming pools.
In July 2017, the A68A iceberg snapped off the Larsen-C Ice Shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula and began its 3.5 year, 4000 km journey across the Southern Ocean. At 5719 square kilometres quarter the size of Wales , it was the biggest iceberg on Earth when it formed and the sixth largest on record.
Around Christmas 2020, the berg received widespread attention as it drifted worryingly close to South Georgia, raising concerns it could harm the island’s fragile ecosystem.
Their findings show that the berg had melted enough as it drifted to avoid damaging the sea floor around South Georgia. However, a side effect of the melting was the release of a colossal 152 billion tonnes of fresh water in close proximity to the island a disturbance that could have a profound impact on the island’s marine habitat.
Anne Braakmann-Folgmann, a researcher at CPOM and PhD candidate at the University of Leeds School of Earth and Environment, is lead author of the study. She said: This is a huge amount of melt water, and the next thing we want to learn is whether it had a positive or negative impact on the ecosystem around South Georgia.
Because A68A took a common route across the Drake Passage, we hope to learn more about icebergs taking a similar trajectory, and how they influence the polar oceans.
For the first two years of its life, A68A stayed close to Antarctica in the cold waters of the Weddell Sea and experienced little in the way of melting. However, once it began its northwards journey across Drake Passage it travelled through increasingly warm waters and began to melt.
Altogether, the iceberg thinned by 67 metres from its initial 235 m thickness, with the rate of melting rising sharply as the berg drifted in the Scotia Sea around South Georgia.
Laura Gerrish, GIS and mapping specialist at BAS and co-author of the study said A68 was an absolutely fascinating iceberg to track all the way from its creation to its end. Frequent measurements allowed us to follow every move and break-up of the berg as it moved slowly northwards through iceberg alley and into the Scotia Sea where it then gained speed and approached the island of South Georgia very closely.
If an iceberg’s keel is too deep it can get stuck on the sea floor. This can be disruptive in several different ways; the scour marks can destroy fauna, and the berg itself can block ocean currents and predator foraging routes. However, this new study reveals that A68A collided only briefly with the sea floor and broke apart shortly afterwards, making it less of a risk in terms of blockage.
By the time it reached the shallow waters around South Georgia, the iceberg’s keel had reduced to 141 metres below the ocean surface, shallow enough to avoid the seabed which is around 150 metres deep.
Nevertheless, the ecosystem and wildlife around South Georgia will certainly have felt the impact of the colossal iceberg’s visit. When icebergs detach from ice shelves, they drift with the ocean currents and wind while releasing cold fresh meltwater and nutrients as they melt.
This process influences the local ocean circulation and fosters biological production around the iceberg. At its peak, the iceberg was melting at a rate of seven metres per month, and in total it released a staggering 152 billion tonnes of fresh water and nutrients.
The journey of A68A has been charted using observations from five different satellites. The iceberg’s area change was recorded using a combination of Sentinel-1, Sentinel-3, and MODIS imagery. Meanwhile, the iceberg’s thickness change was measured using CryoSat-2 and ICESat-2 altimetry. By combining these measurements, the iceberg’s area, thickness, and volume change were determined.
Tommaso Parrinello, CryoSat Mission Manager at the European Space Agency, said: Our ability to study every move of the iceberg in such detail is thanks to advances in satellite techniques and the use of a variety of measurements. Imaging satellites record the location and shape of the iceberg and data from altimetry missions add a third dimension as they measure the height of surfaces underneath the satellites and can therefore observe how an iceberg melts.
Further information:
Image credit: A68A iceberg approaching the island of South Georgia (14 December 2020). The left hand part of the image are clouds. Credit: MODIS image from NASA Worldview Snapshots.
Observing the Disintegration of the A68A Iceberg from Space is published in Remote Sensing of Environment. The article can be found at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rse.2021.112855.
For additional information contact University of Leeds press officer Anna Harrison a.harrison@leeds.ac.uk
