New £8.4M investment continues support for long-term polar science, co-led by the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) and UK’s Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling (CPOM)

Category: Sea Level Rise

New £8.4M investment continues support for long-term polar science, co-led by the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) and UK’s Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling (CPOM)

Posted on by Nicola Bortun

£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.

PRESCIENT will also aid the BAS transition to low carbon science delivery, by progressing delivery of airborne science using remotely piloted autonomous systems (RPAS), while delivering independent scientific advice and support to a range of stakeholders in government, business, and wider society, ensuring that our scientific activities and expertise is available to support solutions.

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.

Read more on the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) website.

£47m to address critical environmental challenges facing the UK

Posted on by Nicola Bortun

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
  • co-benefits, for example, air quality.

The full details can be found at: £47m to address critical environmental challenges facing the UK UKRI

Mega iceberg released 152 billion tonnes of fresh water into ocean

Posted on by Nicola Bortun

Article first published by the University of Leeds 19.01.22

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.

Researchers from the University of Leeds, Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling (CPOM) and British Antarctic Survey (BAS) used satellite measurements to chart the A68A iceberg’s area and thickness change throughout its life cycle.

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

Extreme ice melting in Greenland raises global flood risk

Posted on by Nicola Bortun

Article first published by the University of Leeds 02.11.21

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.

Further information
Increased variability in Greenland Ice Sheet runoff from satellite observations is published 1 November in Nature Communications.
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-26229-4

Contact press officer Lauren Ballinger with media enquiries.

Image credit: Ian Joughin surface meltwater flowing towards the ocean through a channel in Greenland.

CPOM led research shows sea level rise matches worst-case scenario

Posted on by Nicola Bortun
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.