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.
Environmental tipping points occur when warming temperatures lead to changes in the climate system which pass a threshold and become irreversible. Passing these points will lead to changes to sea level, ocean circulation and our weather, something world leaders need to plan for in advance. That’s why it’s vital to monitor for signs we are coming close to and passing these tipping points.
Combining observation and modelling expertise with innovative sensing systems, the programme aims to develop sensing systems for monitoring the Earth’s ice and oceans and place these systems in locations such as the Greenland Ice Sheet and the Subpolar Gyres (ocean circulation systems which sit under an area of constant low atmospheric pressure); both of which have been identified as crucial climate tipping points.
The programme will also look at developing improved models (computer simulations) to produce more robust and accurate predictions of these tipping points and the potential impact on the planet.
The programme is made up of 27 international teams of experts in climate science, maths, computer science, statistics, optics, photonics, and nuclear physics – bringing together this expertise to develop the best possible early warning system for these climate tipping points.
CPOM members are supporting three of these teams:
CryoWatch: Aims to progress the development of affordable, solar-powered, High Altitude Pseudo Satellites (HAPS), to be stationed in the stratosphere for persistent monitoring of polar regions. Led by Steve Tate (Voltitude), the team includes CPOM Co-Director of Science, Professor Mal McMillan.
OptimISM: A Next-Generation Framework for Ice Sheet Modelling. Led by Trystan Surawy-Stepney (University of Leeds), the team includes CPOM Principal Investigator: Land Ice Modelling, Dr Steph Cornford (University of Bristol).
PROMOTE: Progressing Earth System Modelling for Tipping Point Early Warning Systems. Led by Reinhard Schiemann (University of Reading and National Centre for Atmospheric Science), the team includes CPOM Principal Investigator: Land Ice Modelling, Dr Steph Cornford (University of Bristol).
Greenland is a fascinating and beautiful country, with a population of more than 50,000 people. It has long been a key area of focus for polar scientists, due to the importance of observing and modelling of changes to the Greenland ice sheet. This huge expanse of ice, the second largest land ice mass in the world, is more than 2000km in length, 1000km wide and at its thickest point is over 3km thick.
And this ice sheet is melting.
Melting ice sheets directly contribute water to the oceans, leading to sea level rise. This influx of cooler water also affects the ocean circulation, with implications for global weather patterns. Accurately tracking melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets is essential to ensure people all over the world can prepare for the effects of climate change.
As ice sheets are so huge they are incredibly difficult to fully measure in person. Satellite measurements are the only ways we can accurately measure these vast areas.
CPOM has provided assessments of the amount of ice stored in the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets since 2018, via the IMBIE Project (Ice Sheet Mass Balance Intercomparison Project) which uses three decades of satellite data to assess the ice sheets. You can read their most recent report in Earth System Science Data from 2023, which estimates ice losses from these regions since 1992.
Another recent study from December 2024, led by CPOM PhD Researcher, Nitin Ravinder, and published in Geophysical Research Letters, showed that the Greenland ice sheet lost 2347 km3 of ice during the period since 2010 – which has contributed roughly ‘the amount of water stored in Africa’s Lake Victoria’ to the Earth’s oceans. Here’s an animation from Planetary Visions based on this study showing these changes in the Greenland ice sheet.
As sea level rise will affect many millions of people around the world, as well as the numerous at-risk species in coastal habitats, it’s vital that Governments and international bodies are able to plan for this rise. Computer modelling (simulations) is the only way we can accurately predict how the ice sheets might behave in the future.
CPOM provides UK National Capability research in ice sheet modelling, developing the BISICLES model.
BISICLES is a numerical model (simulation) that works with high resolution simulations around the margins of ice sheets (the grounding line), where interactions between the ice sheet and the ocean and atmosphere are the most complex. This is particularly useful when looking at the Greenland ice sheet.
Scientists from CPOM recently worked on combining this system as the ice sheet component within the UKESM (The UK Earth System Model), allowing us to better explore and understand the interactions between the ice sheets and the global ocean and atmospheric circulations (and providing evidence for IPCC reporting).
BISICLES has also been integrated into large international projects such as ISMIP (Ice Sheet Model Intercomparison Project) to help project future changes to global sea levels, something that is particularly difficult to predict beyond the end of the century with one model alone.
The behaviour of the Greenland ice sheet is particularly difficult to predict, as over recent years we have seen points where melting has been more rapid than anticipated, but also points where it has been less than expected. We need to continually hone and improve computer simulations (or models) that can accurately predict how these ice sheets might behave in a rapidly warming planet to account for the complexity of the interactions between the ice sheets and the atmosphere in these regions.
Understanding this part of the world is vital for understanding how we might protect the rest of the Earth in the years to come. By combining expertise in land ice Earth observation with modelling simulations, like BISICLES, CPOM is continuing to increase the accuracy of future projections of sea level rise and weather changes, leading from the melting of the Greenland ice sheet.
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.
Ice sheet models (scientific simulations which aim to predict future behaviour of ice sheets) often disagree on the timing and magnitude of sea level rise up until 2300. For example, projections of Antarctica’s contribution to sea level rise beyond 2100 remain highly uncertain due to processes such as Ice Sheet and Ice Cliff instability which could cause Antarctic melting to contribute more rapidly to sea level rise.
The Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6) is an international effort using different climate models to better understand how the Earth’s climate system responds to various factors. ISMIP6 (Ice Sheet Model Intercomparison Project for CMIP6), co-led by CPOM, is the part of CMIP6 project that examines the ice sheets, aiming to improve predictions of their future contribution to sea level rise, which is critical to assess the impact of melting ice on sea level rise, oceans currents, and weather patterns. By pulling together a range of different models, ISMIP6 supports the scientific community by producing more accurate, robust, multi-century projections of sea level rise and quantifying their associated uncertainties.
The most recent report using the ISMIP6 Model ensemble was released on Wednesday 4 September) in the AGU Earth’s Future journal. The new study (Seroussi et al). investigates the behaviour of the Antarctic Ice Sheet until 2300 using an ensemble of 16 ice-flow models and forcing from global climate models. This is the first multi-century, multi-model projections of the Antarctic Ice Sheet evolution and shows that ice flow models are relatively consistent in predicting a limited Antarctic sea-level rise up until 2100. However, beyond the end of this century, Antarctica’s ice losses increase rapidly thereafter with the choice of ice flow model and different potential influential factors such as carbon emissions (known as climate forcing scenarios) becoming sources of uncertainty.
This model ensemble shows that, under high carbon emission scenarios, some simulations show high levels of ice retreat after 2100 with potential sea level rise of up to 1.7m in 2200 and 4.4 m by 2300. In particular, key regions in West Antarctica, including the Bungenstock Ice Rise, the Siple Coast and the Amundsen Sea sector are predicted to undergo rapid retreat. Results saw strong variations between models on the onset of retreat but good agreement on the pattern of retreat.
In addition to the choice of ice sheet model, this study also highlights the importance of the emission scenario, as ice losses under both low and high emissions remain similar during the 21st century, the two scenarios produce significantly varied results post 2100. This highlights the importance of reducing emissions for the future stability of the Antarctic Ice Sheet as well as the importance of further work on developing and improving accurate and robust models of ice shelf retreat and potential collapse beyond 2100 so that policy makers and scientists can make decisions today which will protect the future of Antarctica beyond tomorrow.
£8.4M has been awarded to the British Antarctic Survey and the Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling to deliver the next 5 years of their long-term polar science activities. The UK Polar Research Expertise for Science and Society (PRESCIENT) programme provides UK national capability (science, such as ongoing datasets and models, which underpins wider scientific research) to understand the impacts of environmental stressors, such as rising global temperatures on polar marine ecosystems. PRESCIENT will also measure and predict polar ice sheet contributions to global sea level rise and extend and improve measurements of changes to polar sea ice.
Announced today the funding is part of £101 million investment by the Natural Environment Research Council, part of UK Research and Innovation, in the UK’s network of leading environmental science research centres to support large-scale environmental observations, modelling and analysis, and research capabilities through innovations in platforms, sensors and data science. These data are crucial for managing natural resources, biodiversity, human health and building our understanding of and resilience to environmental hazards and climate change. It underpins science across the UK’s environmental research sector and supports critical scientific advice to government.
National capability is research funding which, unlike shorter term projects, can span decades and provides ongoing support for large-scale, complex scientific projects of national significance, informing strategic needs and decision-making of the country. Using techniques such as satellite altimetry to study ice motion and the polar oceans, CPOM incorporate the results into models used across the polar research community. CPOM’s data sets and models have been developed and maintained for almost a quarter of a century, and the long-term maintenance of this capability helps provide robust understanding and insights of the cryosphere.
CPOM also contribute to a range of interdisciplinary multi-centre National Capability research projects including CANARI, BIOPOLE, and TerraFIRMA, which have been running since 2022, offering satellite derived estimates of aspects of the cryosphere (such as ice thickness, floe size and sea height), as well as developing advanced simulations. The longevity of our datasets, and the accuracy of our models mean we have a broader view of past and possible future changes. By contributing to projects such as the previous multi-centre National Capability project UKESM (UK Earth System Model), integrating ice sheet model and advanced sea ice physics into the system, we can produce robust projections of ice sheet instability and Arctic sea ice loss, thereby informing sea level rise predictions. Our PRESCIENT programme with BAS continues this work into 2029.
This funding has been awarded from NERC’s National Capability Single Centre Science initiative, one of the UK’s largest environmental science investment programmes.
The UKRI have awarded £47M to NERC research centres to address six critical environmental science challenges facing the UK, including climate change mitigation strategies, coastal flooding & erosion, and extreme weather.
CPOM is to collaborate on 3 projects BIOPOLE, CANARI & TerraFIRMA.
Biogeochemical processes and ecosystem function in a changing polar system (BIOPOLE), £9 million
Led by the British Antarctic Survey, in collaboration with:
British Geological Survey
Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling
National Oceanography Centre
UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology.
Project partners include:
Alfred Wegener Institute, Germany
Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, Germany
University of Alaska Fairbanks, USA
University of Alberta, Canada
University of Bristol, UK
University Centre in Svalbard, Norway.
Climate change is proceeding faster at the poles than any other region, resulting in sea ice loss and glacial melting.
There is a clear urgency in understanding the full implications of these changes for the polar regions themselves and for the wider Earth system.
BIOPOLE will provide a step change in the knowledge and predictive capability concerning how polar ecosystems regulate the chemical balance of the world’s oceans and, through it, their effect on global fish stocks and carbon storage.
Climate change in the Arctic-North Atlantic region and impact on the UK (CANARI), £12 million
Led by the National Centre for Atmospheric Science, in collaboration with:
British Antarctic Survey
British Geological Survey
Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling
National Centre for Earth Observation
National Oceanography Centre
UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology.
The project partner is the Met Office Hadley Centre, UK.
The weather and climate of the UK is shaped by the large-scale circulation of the atmosphere and ocean in the North Atlantic.
This project will advance understanding of the impacts on the UK arising from climate variability and change in the Arctic-North Atlantic region. It will focus on extreme weather and the potential for rapid, disruptive change.
This will enable the UK to play an internationally leading role in addressing the challenges of understanding regional climate change and provide detailed information about impacts on the UK.
Future impacts risks and mitigation actions (TerraFIRMA), £9.5 million
Led by the National Centre for Atmospheric Science, in collaboration with:
British Antarctic Survey
British Geological Survey
Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling
National Centre for Earth Observation
National Oceanography Centre
Plymouth Marine Laboratory
UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology.
Project partner is the Met Office Hadley Centre, UK.
This project will provide reliable guidance on the risks and impacts of future climate change. It will assess a range of mitigation strategies:
impacts on allowable carbon budgets and pathways to net zero
wider environmental, economic and societal impacts, for example, sustainable development goals
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
Global warming has caused extreme ice melting events in Greenland to become more frequent and more intense over the past 40 years according to new research, raising sea levels and flood risk worldwide
Over the past decade alone, 3.5 trillion tonnes of ice has melted from the surface of the island and flowed downhill into the ocean.
That’s enough melted ice to cover the entire UK with around 15 metres of meltwater, or cover the entire city of New York with around 4,500 metres.
The new study, led by the University of Leeds, is the first to use satellite data to detect this phenomena known as ice sheet runoff from space.
The findings, published in Nature Communications, reveal that Greenland’s meltwater runoff has risen by 21% over the past four decades and has become 60% more erratic from one summer to the next.
Important step Lead author Dr Thomas Slater, a Research Fellow in Leeds Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling, said: As we’ve seen with other parts of the world, Greenland is also vulnerable to an increase in extreme weather events.
As our climate warms, it’s reasonable to expect that the instances of extreme melting in Greenland will happen more often observations such as these are an important step in helping us to improve climate models and better predict what will happen this century.
The study, funded by the European Space Agency (ESA) as part of its Polar+Surface Mass Balance Feasibility project, used measurements from the ESA’s CryoSat-2 satellite mission.
The research shows that over the past decade (2011 to 2020), increased meltwater runoff from Greenland raised the global sea level by one centimetre. One-third of this total was produced in just two hot summers (2012 and 2019), when extreme weather led to record-breaking levels of ice melting not seen in the past 40 years.
Raised sea levels caused by ice melt heightens the risk of flooding for coastal communities worldwide and disrupts marine ecosystems in the Arctic Ocean that indigenous communities rely on for food.
It can also alter patterns of ocean and atmospheric circulation which affect weather conditions around the planet.
Extreme weather During the past decade, runoff from Greenland has averaged 357 billion tonnes per year, reaching a maximum of 527 billion tonnes of ice melt in 2012, when changes in atmospheric patterns caused unusually warm air to sit over much of the ice sheet. This was more than twice the minimum runoff of 247 billion tonnes that occurred in 2017.
The changes are related to extreme weather events, such as heatwaves, which have become more frequent and are now a major cause of ice loss from Greenland because of the runoff they produce.
Dr Slater said: There are, however, reasons to be optimistic. We know that setting and meeting meaningful targets to cut emissions could reduce ice losses from Greenland by a factor of three, and there is still time to achieve this.
These first observations of Greenland runoff from space can also be used to verify how climate models simulate ice sheet melting which, in turn, will allow improved predictions of how much Greenland will raise the global sea level in future as extreme weather events become more common.
Greater understanding Study co-author Dr Amber Leeson, Senior Lecturer in Environmental Data Science at Lancaster University, said: Model estimates suggest that the Greenland ice sheet will contribute between about 3 and 23 cm to global sea-level rise by 2100.
This prediction has a wide range, in part because of uncertainties associated with simulating complex ice melt processes, including those associated with extreme weather. These new spaceborne estimates of runoff will help us to understand these complex ice melt processes better, improve our ability to model them, and thus enable us to refine our estimates of future sea level rise.
Finally, the study shows that satellites are able to provide instant estimates of summer ice melting, which supports efforts to expand Greenland’s hydropower capacity and Europe’s ambition to launch the CRISTAL mission to succeed CryoSat-2.
ESA’s CryoSat mission manager, Tommaso Parrinello, said: Since it was launched over 11 years ago, CryoSat has yielded a wealth of information about our rapidly changing polar regions. This remarkable satellite remains key to scientific research and the indisputable facts, such as these findings on meltwater runoff, that are so critical to decision-making on the health of our planet.
Looking further to the future, the Copernicus Sentinel Expansion mission CRISTAL will ensure that Earth’s vulnerable ice will be monitored in the coming decades. In the meantime, it is imperative that CryoSat remains in orbit for as long as possible to reduce the gap before these new Copernicus missions are operational.
Article published by University of Leeds:
Ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, whose melting rates are rapidly increasing, have raised global sea level by 1.8cm since the 1990s, and are matching worst-case climate warming scenarios.
Image credit: Professor Anna Hogg, University of Leeds
According to a new study led by Dr Tom Slater (University of Leeds) from the Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling, with co-authors from the University of Leeds and Danish Meteorological Institute, if these rates continue the ice sheets are expected to raise sea levels by a further 17cm and expose an additional 16 million people to annual coastal flooding by the end of the century.
The worst-case scenarios are those predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Since the ice sheets were first monitored by satellite in the 1990s, melting from Antarctica has pushed global sea levels up by 7.2mm, while Greenland has contributed 10.6mm. And the latest measurements show that the world’s oceans are now rising by 4mm each year.
“The melting is overtaking the climate models we use to guide us, and we are in danger of being unprepared for the risks posed by sea level rise.”
DR TOM SLATER, UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS
“Although we anticipated the ice sheets would lose increasing amounts of ice in response to the warming of the oceans and atmosphere, the rate at which they are melting has accelerated faster than we could have imagined,” said Dr Slater.
“The melting is overtaking the climate models we use to guide us, and we are in danger of being unprepared for the risks posed by sea level rise.”
The results are published today in a study in the journal Nature Climate Change. It compares the latest results from satellite surveys from the Ice Sheet Mass Balance Intercomparison Exercise (IMBIE) with calculations from climate models.
The authors warn that the ice sheets are losing ice at a rate predicted by the worst-case climate warming scenarios in the last large IPCC report.
Professor Anna Hogg, study co-author and climate researcher in the School of Earth & Environment at the Leeds, said: “ice sheet losses continue to track our worst-case climate warming scenarios we should expect an additional 17cm of sea level rise from the ice sheets alone. That’s enough to double the frequency of storm-surge flooding in many of the world’s largest coastal cities.”
So far, global sea levels have increased in the most part through a mechanism called thermal expansion, which means that volume of seawater expands as it gets warmer. But in the last five years, ice melt from the ice sheets and mountain glaciers has overtaken global warming as the main cause of rising sea levels.
Dr Ruth Mottram, study co-author and climate researcher at the Danish Meteorological Institute, said: “It is not only Antarctica and Greenland that are causing the water to rise. In recent years, thousands of smaller glaciers have begun to melt or disappear altogether, as we saw with the glacier Ok in Iceland, which was declared “dead” in 2014. This means that melting of ice has now taken over as the main contributor of sea level rise.”
Further information
This study is an outcome of the Ice Sheet Mass Balance Inter-Comparison Exercise (IMBIE) supported by the ESA Climate Change Initiative and the NASA Cryosphere Program.http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41558-020-0893-y
For additional information and interviews, please contact pressoffice@leeds.ac.uk.
