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The voices of glaciers : stories of grief and hope amidst shrinking glaciers in the tropics

Published on April 02, 2025

During the Celebrations of the International Year of Glaciers’ Preservation 2025 in Paris on the 20th and 21st March 2025 the IGE has presented the results of several initiatives. Among those, the book “The voices of glaciers : stories of grief and hope amidst shrinking glaciers in the tropics”, co-edited by UNESCO and IRD Editions.
As glacier melting continues unabated at all latitudes, the loss of glaciers in the tropics provides an early glimpse of how a world without ice might be. (…)

A novel study reveals a significant decline in glaciers on a global scale

Published on February 20, 2025

Since 2000, the world’s glaciers have lost 5% of their initial volume, and 273 billion tonnes of ice are disappearing every year - the equivalent of 3 Olympic swimming pools per second. These are the results of an in-depth study of the global evolution of glaciers (excluding the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets) between 2000 and 2023, based for the first time on a combination of field measurements and satellite observations. This unprecedented study was carried out by the Glambie (…)

Biodiversity and Climate COPs : turning promises into action

Published on February 04, 2025

Author of a publication on nature conservation targets, Ignacio Palomo, researcher IRD at the institut des géosciences de l’environnement (IGE-OSUG, CNRS/IRD/UGA/INRAE/GrenobleINP-UGA) analyses the expectations and challenges of the Biodiversity and Climate COPs.
« As you probably saw in the news, at the end of 2024 world leaders met in Cali, Colombia for the COP16 on biodiversity and in Baku, Azerbaijan for the COP29 on the climate.. For the uninitiated, COP stands for Conference of (…)

Avalanches : unlikely allies of glaciers

Published on January 22, 2025

Avalanches are often seen as a danger in mountain sports, but they also have a beneficial side in that they supply many high-altitude glaciers with large quantities of snow, which they redistribute by gravity from the surrounding steep slopes.
A team from the Grenoble Institute of Environmental Geosciences (IGE) recently set out to quantify for the first time this avalanche snow supply to Argentière Glacier in the Mt Blanc massif. The difficulty of this study lies in the fact that it is (…)

A New Map of Antarctica Reveals Never-Before-Explored Seafloors

Published on January 09, 2025

Around the edges of the Antarctic ice sheet, glaciers flow toward the ocean, forming long floating ice shelves that regulate the flow of ice from the sheet into the ocean.
The increased loss of mass from the Antarctic ice sheet has been attributed to the significant weakening of these floating ice shelves. This weakening originates from the advection of warm, saline waters of circumpolar origin onto the continental shelf. These waters are then channeled beneath the ice shelves, where they (…)

Discovery of Atmospheric CO2 "Jumps" Over the Last 500,000 Years in Antarctic Ice Cores

Published on October 14, 2024

A new study, supported by the Make Our Planet Great Again program as part of the HOTCLIM project, and conducted by an international scientific team led by the Institute of Environmental Geosciences in Grenoble (IGE – CNRS/INRAE/IRD/UGA - Grenoble INP-UGA) in collaboration with the Laboratory of Climate and Environmental Sciences, LSCE (CEA/CNRS/UVSQ), the University of New South Wales, and the University of Bern, has revealed new rapid variations within global fluctuations of atmospheric (…)

ERC Starting 2024 : Romain Millan awarded for his IceDaM project

Published on September 06, 2024

The European Research Council (ERC) has announced the award of 494 Starting Grants to young scientists and scholars across Europe. The funding - totalling nearly €780 million - supports cutting-edge research in a wide range of fields, from life sciences and physics to social sciences and humanities. It will help researchers at the beginning of their careers to launch their own projects, form their teams and pursue their most promising ideas.
Supporting curiosity and passion
Iliana (…)

European Research Course for the Atmosphere : registrations are open !

Published on September 05, 2024

ERCA is a course for early career scientists to advance the frontiers of atmospheric science and address pressing environmental challenges.
Know more about ERCA
It is an advanced international multidisciplinary course designed for early-career scientists. Rooted in atmospheric sciences, it also extends to the social aspects of global change. ERCA is open to modellers, field scientists, and lab scientists, providing an excellent opportunity for participants to broaden their scientific (…)

Avalanche maps of the Alps, Himalayas and Karakorum : variability and impact on glaciers

Published on June 27, 2024

Snow and ice avalanches are events that contribute to the accumulation of snow on the surface of mountain glaciers. They are therefore important elements to consider when modeling the evolution of glacier mass balance, which is a metric for glacier health. On the other hand, data on avalanches in remote glaciated massifs of the Alps and Himalayas are almost non-existent or highly biased spatially or temporally, which limits our understanding of these phenomena and their link with glacier (…)

Historical aerial photographs of East Antarctica gives a unique insight of the evolution of the ice since the 1930s

Published on May 30, 2024

Rediscovered historical aerial photographs of East Antarctica offer the earliest insight into ice evolution in Antarctica, revealing that glaciers along nearly 2000 km of coastline have remained stable or have slightly grown over the last 85 years.
The results have just been published in the journal Nature Communications and are the result of a collaboration between researchers from the University of Copenhagen, The Norwegian Polar Institute, The Arctic University of Norway, and the (…)