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The National Park Service (NPS) quietly removed a visitor center sign saying the glaciers at Glacier National Park would disappear by 2020 due to climate change. As it turns out, higher-than-average snowfall in recent years upended computer model projectionsfrom the early 2000s that NPS based its claim glaciers “will all be gone by the year 2020,” federal officials said.

Some of the world’s most iconic and beautiful locations will be transformed by global warming, with glaciers vanishing from sites such as Everest’s Khumbu Icefall in decades. Glaciers will vanish from half of U.N.-designated World Heritage sites this century unless greenhouse gas emissions are curbed, research published in Earth’s Future suggests. Sites in the Swiss Alps such as the Grosser Aletschgletscher will see ice vanish, the researchers warned. So will Greenland’s Jakobshavn Isbrae said researchers from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which collaborated with the University of Fribourg on the study. Peter Shadie, the director of the...

CNN is breathless over a “Gigantic hole two-thirds the size of Manhattan discovered in Antarctic glacier.” I’m sure they wish the hole actually were in Manhattan and included Trump Tower, but alas the hole is far away from their nemesis, the President.

One-third of Himalayan glaciers will melt by the end of the century due to climate change, threatening water sources for 1.9 billion people, even if current efforts to reduce climate change succeed, an assessment warns. If global efforts to curb climate change fail, the impact could be far worse: a loss of two-thirds of the region's glaciers by 2100, said the Hindu Kush Himalaya Assessment released Monday by the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development. "Global warming is on track to transform the frigid, glacier-covered mountain peaks of the Hindu Kush Himalayas cutting across eight countries to bare rocks in...

Researchers say a massive cavity the size of two-thirds of Manhattan was found under a glacier in Antarctica. The pocket is a sign of "rapid decay" and just one of "several disturbing discoveries" made recently regarding the glacier, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory said in a news release Wednesday. "[The size of] a cavity under a glacier plays an important role in melting," said Pietro Milillo of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "As more heat and water get under the glacier, it melts faster." The growing cavity sits in West Antarctica at the bottom of Thwaites Glacier, which is about as big...

Records have been shattered as the polar vortex unleashed the harshest cold in years on the midwestern United States during the final days of January. After the polar vortex plunged southward, temperatures plummeted under 20 below zero F from North Dakota to northern Illinois during the morning hours of both Wednesday and Thursday. On Thursday morning, 9 states in the Midwest and northern New England recorded temperatures lower than the northernmost point in Alaska (Utqiagvik, formerly known as Barrow). Biting winds made the extreme cold more life-threatening as AccuWeather RealFeel® Temperatures dropped under 50 below zero. Frostbite can occur in...

The Grand Canyon is a gigantic geological library, with rocky layers that tell much of the story of Earth’s history. Curiously though, a sizeable layer representing anywhere from 250 million years to 1.2 billion years is missing. Known as the Great Unconformity, this massive temporal gap can be found not just in this famous crevasse, but in places all over the world. In one layer, you have the Cambrian period, which started roughly 540 million years ago and left behind sedimentary rocks packed with the fossils of complex, multicellular life. Directly below, you have fossil-free crystalline basement rock, which formed...

In the summer of 1987, a woman visiting Alaska was crushed by a 1,000-pound chunk of ice. According to news reports at the time, Thais Grabenauer, 59, had been taking pictures with her husband at the foot of Exit Glacier, a towering wall of ice that’s one of the most popular attractions in Kenai Fjords National Park. A half-ton piece of the glacier calved off as the couple was snapping, killing Grabenauer and injuring her husband. It was one of those wrong place, wrong time tragedies that seem unlikely to happen again. But in the three decades since Grabenauer’s death,...

Buried glaciers have been spotted on Mars, offering new hints about how much water may be accessible on the Red Planet and where it is located, researchers said Thursday. Although ice has long been known to exist on Mars, a better understanding of its depth and location could be vital to future human explorers, said the report in the US journal Science. "Astronauts could essentially just go there with a bucket and a shovel and get all the water they need," said co-author Shane Byrne of the University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory in Tucson. A total of eight...

An Indian court declared Himalayan glaciers “legal persons” under law in a bid to save them from global warming. The court’s two judges claimed Indian law must gives glaciers “living entity” status to keep them from melting. “The rights of these entities shall be equivalent to the rights of human beings and any injury or harm caused to these bodies shall be treated as injury or harm caused to human beings,” the highest court in Indian state of Uttarakhand ruled. “In other words, the entity acts like a natural person, but only through a designated person.” “For a bigger thrust...

One of the world’s largest ocean circulation systems may not be as stable as today’s weather models predict, according to a new study. In fact, changes in the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) — the same deep-water ocean current featured in the movie “The Day After Tomorrow” — could occur quite abruptly, in geologic terms, the study says. The research appears in the Jan. 4 online edition of the journal Science Advances.

Academics at the University of Oregon have determined that glaciers and the science that studies them are deeply sexist.“Merging feminist postcolonial science studies and feminist political ecology, the feminist glaciology framework generates robust analysis of gender, power, and epistemologies in dynamic social-ecological systems, thereby leading to more just and equitable science and human-ice interactions,” reads the paper’s abstract. The research was published in the peer-reviewed journal Progress in Human Geography in January.The study, by historian Dr. Mark Carey and some student researchers, was financially supported by taxpayer dollars. The National Science Foundation (NSF) gave Carey a five-year grant which he...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The melting of glaciers caused by the world's rising temperatures appears to be causing a slight slowing of the Earth's rotation in another illustration of the far-reaching impact of global climate change, scientists said on Friday. The driving force behind the modest but discernible changes in the Earth's rotation measured by satellites and astronomical methods is a global sea level rise fueled by an influx of meltwater into the oceans from glaciers, the researchers said. "Because glaciers are at high latitudes, when they melt they redistribute water from these high latitudes towards lower latitudes, and like a...

A geology team has contradicted claims that bluestones were dug by Bronze Age man from a west Wales quarry and carried 240 miles to build Stonehenge. In a new twist, Open University geologists say the stones were in fact moved to Salisbury Plain by glaciers. Last year archaeologists said the stones came from the Preseli Hills. Recent research in the Oxford Journal of Archaeology suggests the stones were ripped from the ground and moved by glaciers during the Ice Age. Geologists from the Open University first claimed in 1991 that the bluestones at one of Britain's best-known historic landmarks had...

The Heartland Institute published “Top 10 Global Warming Lies” to answer the reporting of the Left on the effects of global warming. Specifically, the report was designed as a response to the Environmental Defense Fund’s most recent fundraising effort, “10 Global Warming Effects That May Shock You.” global warming lies heartland institute 1. EDF claimed global warming cause 100,000 bat deaths in Australia ~ However, the fact is that global warming activists love wind power, which actually kills up to a million bats each year. ~ Also, there was no evidence that global warming caused the death of bats, as...

A deluge that swept the Land of Israel more than 7,000 years ago, submerging six Neolithic villages opposite the Carmel Mountains, is the origin of the biblical flood of Noah, a British marine archeologist said Tuesday. The new theory about the source of the great flood detailed in the Book of Genesis comes amid continuing controversy among scholars over whether the inundation of the Black Sea more than seven millennia ago was the biblical flood. In the theory posited by British marine archeologist Dr. Sean Kingsley and published in the Bulletin of the Anglo-Israeli Archaeological Society, the drowning of the...

A deluge that swept the Land of Israel more than 7,000 years ago, submerging six Neolithic villages opposite the Carmel Mountains, is the origin of the biblical flood of Noah, a British marine archeologist said Tuesday. The new theory about the source of the great flood detailed in the Book of Genesis comes amid continuing controversy among scholars over whether the inundation of the Black Sea more than seven millennia ago was the biblical flood. In the theory posited by British marine archeologist Dr. Sean Kingsley and published in the Bulletin of the Anglo-Israeli Archaeological Society, the drowning of the...

A deluge that swept the Land of Israel more than 7,000 years ago, submerging six Neolithic villages opposite the Carmel Mountains, is the origin of the biblical flood of Noah, a British marine archeologist said Tuesday. The new theory about the source of the great flood detailed in the Book of Genesis comes amid continuing controversy among scholars over whether the inundation of the Black Sea more than seven millennia ago was the biblical flood. In the theory posited by British marine archeologist Dr. Sean Kingsley and published in the Bulletin of the Anglo-Israeli Archaeological Society, the drowning of the...

It's a terrifying vision: A violent eruption of Italy's Mount Etna triggers a massive collapse of one flank of the volcano, sending 35 cubic kilometers of debris--the equivalent of 10,000 Cheops pyramids--hurtling at 400 kilometers an hour into the Ionian Sea. The Big Splash unleashes a 50-meter-tall wall of water that, within a few hours, wipes out coastal settlements across the Mediterranean. This catastrophe happened 8000 years ago--and a Mediterranean monster of similar magnitude could happen again. That's the scenario invoked in an analysis in last week's Geophysical Research Letters. "It was an extraordinary event, probably the largest tsunami unleashed...

Source: American Geophysical Union Date: November 28, 2006 Landslide At Mt. Etna Generated A Large Tsunami In The Mediterranean Sea Nearly 8000 Years Ago Geological evidence indicates that the eastern flanks of Mt. Etna volcano, located on Italy's island of Sicily, suffered at least one large collapse nearly 8,000 years ago. Pareschi et al. modeled this collapse and discovered that the volume of landslide material, combined with the force of the debris avalanche, would have generated a catastrophic tsunami, which would have impacted all of the Eastern Mediterranean. Simulations show that the resulting tsunami waves would have destabilized soft marine...