Carrie Lear (she/her)

The Greenlandification of Antarctica - Nature Geoscience Climate and ice sheet processes in Antarctica increasingly reflect those observed earlier in Greenland. Applying process insights from Greenland can improve projections of future Antarctic ice and climate behaviour.

The Greenlandification of Antarctica

Antarctica is beginning to behave more like Greenland, with surface melt, ice dynamics, and climate feedbacks in Antarctica exhibiting "Greenland-like” traits, which have major implications for sea-level rise projections.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Before and after images show glaciers vanishing before our eyes - BBC News They are melting like never seen before, changing landscapes around the world beyond recognition.

The before and after images showing glaciers vanishing before our eyes

www.bbc.com/news/article...

🧵🧪 In session on policy and societal requirements at the Royal Society discussion meeting today, Prof Hans-Otto Pörtner, former Co-Chair of the IPCC Working Group II, stated that he thinks keeping global temperature rise "below 1.5 [°C above pre-industrial] is probably now out of reach".

This would be laughable if it wasn't so serious: yet again, the Tories are claiming that we can get "all our oil and gas" from the North Sea and that we should be doing even more to support the industry to extract.

There are several reasons why we should treat this with maximum scepticism:

Major sea level fall during the Pliocene M2 glaciation - Nature Communications This study refines benthic foraminiferal Mg/Ca paleothermometry to reduce uncertainties to ±0.2-0.3 °C, which was then applied in Atlantic and Pacific sediment cores to reconstruct Mid-Pliocene M2 gla...

New paper! Check out @zifeiyang.bsky.social gorgeous data from M2 glaciation (3.3Ma) - stunning Melonis Mg/Ca temperature records allow us to be confident about ice growth, but this was not like later glaciations following iNHG, we think gateways were more important: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Trump’s draft budget eviscerates weather and climate tracking and research | CNN The move would devastate weather and climate research even as weather is becoming more erratic and extreme, and would cripple the US industries — including agriculture — that depend on free, accurate ...

The budget proposal eliminates:

NOAA’s Oceanic and Atmospheric Research office

Stops funding regional climate data, climate competitive research or sea grant programs

Severely defunds the Natl Ocean Service & the NMFS

www.cnn.com/2025/04/11/c...

Subglacial water amplifies Antarctic contributions to sea-level rise - Nature Communications Hidden water beneath Antarctica’s ice can accelerate ice loss, potentially raising sea levels by over 2 meters by 2300. These findings highlight the urgent need to incorporate evolving subglacial hydr...

📣 Our new paper is out in Nature Communications!
Subglacial water—often overlooked—can change sea-level rise projections by up to a factor of three. Big implications for how we model Antarctica.
🔗 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

IPCC AR6 Sea Level Projection Tool Visualize and download global and local sea level projections from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Sixth Assessment Report.

You want to know about this NASA Sea Level Projection Tool, which allows you to visualize and download the sea level projection data from the IPCC 6th Assessment Report (AR6).

🧪🌊 🧵 As the minimum in Antarctic sea-ice extent has now dipped below 2 million km² for the third year in a row, it is looking increasingly like this is the new normal. In the 10 years up to 2015 the minimum extent averaged more than 3 million km².
Graph from @nsidc.bsky.social
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Distinct roles for precession, obliquity, and eccentricity in Pleistocene 100-kyr glacial cycles Identifying the specific roles of precession, obliquity, and eccentricity in glacial-interglacial transitions is hindered by imprecise age control. We circumvent this problem by focusing on the morpho...

This paper by Barker et al resolves many details about how Earth’s orbital wobbles caused glacial cycles of expansion & contraction of ice sheets over the last ~800,000 years 🧵 ⚒️🧪 1/11 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Climate change in the polar regions of our warming world is threatening to transform many of its features, such as this icy tableau in the Fish Islands off the coast of the Antarctic Peninsula. There is still much to learn about these places before we know better what those changes may be.

A new special issue of Science highlights research on Earth’s frozen places—from the Arctic to the Antarctic—and how it’s changing due to climate change and the geopolitical challenges this important work faces.

Learn more: https://scim.ag/4jPYRID

Some people on this and other social media platforms have been claiming that something dramatic is about to happen at Thwaites Glacier, and implying that this will result of an abrupt rise is sea level within a few years. So what's really going on? 🧵🧪

Current policies & NDCs take the world to 2-3C in 2100, across a range of studies.

The biggest gap is strengthening climate action to ensure net zero pledges are met, leading to <2C in 2100.

@hausfath.bsky.social
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

We all think plastic pollution is a problem, and it is. In the nearly 70 years between 1950 and 2019, the world produced a total of ~9.5 billion tonnes of plastic.

But all the plastic we have EVER produced weighs as much as CO₂ we emitted into the atmosphere during the first three months of 2024!

In our warming world there is an increasing chance of extreme rainfall events and flash flooding

For every 1C rise in temperature the atmosphere can hold 7% more moisture...

a cartoon with two panels panel one is a stick figure saying "oh! a fossil fuel!!" standing above a crudely drawn black lump under a brown ground Panel two is them walking away and saying "I'll just leave it there" The head of the person is not a drawn circle but the letter O, because the random software I used to draw it did that for unexplained reasons

Please allow me to re-share my rough sketch of some advanced carbon capture technology

Climate crisis to blame for dozens of ‘impossible’ heatwaves, studies reveal Exclusive: Analyses are stark evidence of how global heating is already supercharging deadly weather beyond anything ever experienced by humanity

It's the extremes that will get us. A hotter world has much hotter heat waves.

www.theguardian.com/environment/...

#PolarPride pin and sticker

Changes in the #PolarRegions will affect everyone. Understanding and predicting this change needs commitment and talent; and that needs a supportive and inclusive community. Wishing everyone a happy #PolarPride as part of a wider celebration of #DiversityInPolarScience 🐻‍❄️🐧🥶🏳️‍🌈

Please share - PhD with me, #lnadler and BAS
colleagues Lloyd Peck, Gabi Stowasser and Ryan Saunders at unisouthampton.
- Fish metabolism across latitudes - lovely team, cool science and great fish! Please contact me, details: tinyurl.com/mhfp8f2h #MarineLife #Science

The Met Office climate data portal Explore and download observed and projected climate data from the Met Office.

The Met Office has been working hard to make more of our weather and climate data available for interest or research. I’ll share some links in a thread 🧪First up is our climate data portal climatedataportal.metoffice.gov.uk

While it's very funny to watch The Metals Company whine about the deep ocean oxygen discovery they helped fund, I worry that this only the start. Climate tech startups want science to support their business case, but many are going to discover that science is about reality, not their bottom line
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Paris is warming

#ShowYourStripes
#Olympics

‘It’s good news’: Scientists suspect history about to be made in China Evidence is mounting that some time over the past few months, China’s greenhouse gas emissions peaked. If so, it is likely that a global decline has begun.

Excellent piece from the Australian Sydney Morning Herald that puts the Chinese green industrial revolution in a balanced context and language most can absorb. Excellent journalism www.smh.com.au/environment/...

Warming stripes showing the increase in global temperatures from 1850 to 2023.

It's #ShowYourStripes Day. Here are ours.

As our planet warms, so does the ocean, sending warmer waters to Antarctica & under the ice shelves.

Ice shelves act as vital dams, holding back the ice sheets flowing to the sea & slowing sea level rise.

#SaveTheShelves #ClimateCrisis 🧪

This is the right image to use for a heat wave; not one of children playing in the fountain or people frolicking on the beach.

Data Explorer

Just landed: the new CAT Data Explorer! It brings together data from country analyses, ratings & 1.5°C compatible benchmarks to help policymakers, researchers, media, & interested citizens better understand countries’ progress on climate mitigation climateactiontracker.org/cat-data-exp...

Announcing this year’s postgraduate conference to be hosted by Queen’s University, Belfast from the 29 -31st August! This is a great opportunity to showcase your research in a friendly environment, and get to know other Quaternary ECRs. Registration will be open soon!

Screenshot from my collaborator Joe Botting's fb post: There's horrendous news about funding for Amgueddfa Cymru - National Museum Wales... and they need help. I'm an Honorary Research Fellow there, but the current funding cuts mean that the geology department is about to cut down to almost nobody. As I understand it, they will lose everyone except one palaeontology curator and one collections manager. No other staff, and no mineralogists whatsoever - they will all be sacked, including three of my friends, at a time when finding another job in the field is nigh-on impossible. The NMW palaeontology collections are a major repository of knowledge, both of Welsh material and further afield. Having so few staff basically mothballs the collection, and puts it at risk of closing completely. This is unthinkable... but it seems to be happening. The cuts also affect the National Library and the Royal Commission. I'm not one for petitions in general, but this one needs help in order to be

Museum folks, please bring your fury! Like the Duke herabarium, the National Museum of Wales is now in danger of losing support for all its geology/paleo collections!
🧪

Petition:
petitions.senedd.wales/petitions/24...

Very excited to see this paper in print written by the first graduate student who worked in my laboratory, Maya Prabhakar, on planktic #foraminifera in Recent Arctic Ocean sediments!

Take home message: Arctic forams are weird, but not *THAT* weird...

🧪🔬🐚

pubs.geoscienceworld.org/cushmanfound...