Tag Archives: Planetary science

Narwhals transmit climate data from Arctic seas

The cold water beneath the winter pack ice in Baffin Bay is getting warmer, according to measurements taken by thermometer-wearing narwhals. The data collected from the diving mammals fill in a geographical and seasonal gap in the region’s climate records, as no winter temperatures were previously available from the area. The data also confirm that a warming trend measured during earlier summer-only studies of the West Greenland Current continued in the three years to 2007.

“We basically knew nothing about winters up in Baffin Bay,” says physical oceanographer Mike Steele at the University of Washington in Seattle, who co-authored the study, which appeared last week in the Journal of Geophysical Research. “But there is a lot of interest in the flow of seawater around Greenland.”

Read the rest of this news story on Nature News [html] or here [pdf].

Iceland Reporting Trip Roundup

I went to Iceland in April to report on volcano monitoring during the Eyjafjallajökull eruption for Science Magazine.

That story, which appeared 23 April 2010, is here.

A pair of photos from my field trips appeared in my aunt’s Long Island newspapers (L&M Publications) the week of 26 April. See them here.

A first-person essay on the visit appeared in Global Talent, a Catalan science website, on 4 May, here.

Another feature, including two of my photographs, appeared in the Financial Times Weekend Magazine on 22 May, here.

A news item appeared in Discover Magazine in the September issue, here.

Iceland’s Monster Bares Its Heart

This past spring’s eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland was a nightmare for travelers, but it gave scientists in Europe unprecedented access to a complex eruption right in their backyard. Old workhorses of volcanology–seismometers and GPS sensors, which detect movement of the ground–first picked up Eyjafjallajökull’s stirrings in early January. (For the record: The name is pronounced “AY-yah-fyah-lah-YOH-kuul.”) But when the volcano turned volatile in mid-April, scientists took to the skies, enlisting specially equipped planes to study the eruption and its effects on the overlying glacier. Continue reading Iceland’s Monster Bares Its Heart

Climate Scientists Shine Light on Cave Ice

EISRIESENWELT, AUSTRIA—Tracing his glove along a chalky layer in a house-size block of ice that lines this cave in the Austrian Alps, Michael Behm can feel all that is left of an ancient warm spell. The ice, likely formed over the decades or centuries as calcium-enriched rainwater trickled deep in to the cave and froze, must have once warmed enough on top to melt and release a few years’ worth of the mineral, the Vienna University of Technology geophysicist explains.

Continue reading Climate Scientists Shine Light on Cave Ice