Keir Nichols

Image showing front page of briefing document

🧪🧵 Future change to #ThwaitesGlacier, Antarctica constitutes the largest uncertainty in #sea-level rise forecasts. The Science Coordination Office of the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration recently issued a briefing document summarising some key findings - thwaitesglacier.org/findings

Reindeer in Ljungris, Berg Municipality, Jämtland County, Sweden. Arild Vågen.

Excited to advertise a new interdisciplinary PhD opportunity at @geogdurham.bsky.social - "From ice to ecosystem: assessing the risk of glacier melt and legacy contamination for reindeer in Sápmi (Lapland)" ❄️ 🦌

To learn more about the project and how to apply visit: iapetus.ac.uk/studentships...

Applications are now open for this years’ @iapetusdtp.bsky.social PhD projects … including this one investigating ice sheet and glacier history of the Sør Rondane Mountains in East Antarctica by developing in-situ 14C cosmogenic exposure dating methods - more here:

iapetus.ac.uk/studentships...

A person standing on a moraine which is in front of a mountain. The mountain is in East Antarctica, with a small glacier between the mountain and moraine. The person is using a saw to collect a rock sample from the surface of a boulder on top of the moraine.

A photo taken from a mountain in East Antarctica, with moraines and blue ice in the foreground, and the vast East Antarctic Ice Sheet extending to the horizon. Some small mountains (nunataks) are poking out above the surface of the ice sheet at varying distances.

Applications are now open for a Glasgow-based Iapetus DTP project centred on using in situ 14C to study glacier histories in East Antarctica! tinyurl.com/3ddvynn2 @stever60.bsky.social @uofglasgow.bsky.social @iapetusdtp.bsky.social @bas.ac.uk

Photo of Lake Tilicio in Nepal with an inset core showing our team collecting sediment cores from the lake

Applications are now open for this years’ BAS Iapetus PhD projects … including one working on our Big Thaw project investigating extreme precipitation in Nepal from sediment core and climate data - more details in this link @iapetusdtp.bsky.social @bas.ac.uk

iapetus.ac.uk/studentships...

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...

🚨New paper 🚨@natgeosci.nature.com Greenlandification of Antarctica - comment by me + colleagues @dmidk.bsky.social @eo4cryo.bsky.social + @universityofleeds.bsky.social showing how Antarctica increasingly resembles Greenland- drawing on a mass of work from @esaclimate.bsky.social

rdcu.be/eJiqJ

Archive images of Schwarzberggletscher, Switzerland, showing the glacier front and its advance to produce a moraine.

Repeat DEMs from the 1974 to 2010 show that the glacier advanced and built a moraine, but that the landscape thawed since the early 1990s.

🏔️❄️New paper: “Multi-temporal DEMs used to quantify the geomorphological impact of a late 20th century glacier re-advance at Schwarzberggletscher, Switzerland”.

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

#glaciers #climatechange #sfm #geomorphology

The EDIG logo. The EDIG Logo is a blue and green (representing land masses and the ocean) globe, with a grey banner wrapping around its centre. Within the grey banner are the letters 'E. D. I. G'. There are three blue hands holding up the globe.

📣 📣 We are back! 📣 📣

After more than 2 years away from social media, we are excited to reconnect and engage with the community. Life changes, new jobs, and moves around the world have kept us quiet - but behind the scenes, we have been planning and building. Now we are ready to relaunch EDIG!
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The review includes many illustrious co-authors including @polarguy.bsky.social, @siegfried.bsky.social, @changingice.bsky.social, @mikebentley.bsky.social, @christinebatchelor.bsky.social, @davidsmall.bsky.social, @helen-amanda.bsky.social 🎉 and many more not on Bluesky!

A busy figure with three panels (a, b, and c). Panel a is a plot with distance along centreline (in km) on the x axis and elevation (in metres above sea level) on the y axis. The plot shows the location (along flowline) and elevation of samples collected for cosmogenic nuclide exposure dating at sites adjacent to the Foundation Ice Stream. Panel b is a map that shows the Foundation Ice Stream (and neighbouring ice streams and glaciers), the flowline used in panel a, and the locations from which the samples in panel a were collected. Panel c is a plot with age (in thousands of years) on the x axis and elevation above modern ice surface (in metres) on the y axis. Exposure ages (between 20 ka and the present day) from the sites in panels a and b are plotted, with most of them falling between ~4 and 9 ka. The ages show that the Foundation Ice Stream thinned by hundreds of metres (at least 700 to 800 m) between about 9 and 4 ka.

Chuffed to be included in this review paper on the Foundation-Patuxent-Academy ice stream system, Antarctica led by Neil Ross - you can see the preprint in open review here: doi.org/10.5194/egus... - featuring the busiest figure I've ever made 🇦🇶🧊

A photo looking up a valley towards Taullicocha Glacier in Peru. There are prominent cross-valley moraines which we date using cosmogenic 10Be in the paper linked in the previous post.

A close up photo of small pieces of granitic rock that were collected from the surface of a boulder on the crest of a moraine in Peru. Quartz was isolated from these rocks for 10Be surface exposure dating.

I was chuffed to be asked to do the lab work for this study during my postdoc. Being published with Neil, who taught me during undergrad in Aberystwyth, is a dream come true! It was also super cool to work with @eisstrom.bsky.social, @matt-peacey.bsky.social, and many co-authors not on Bluesky!

Younger Dryas glacier advances in the tropical Andes driven by increased precipitation - Scientific Reports Scientific Reports - Younger Dryas glacier advances in the tropical Andes driven by increased precipitation

New paper alert 🚨🏔️ We use 10Be exposure dating and ELA reconstructions to shed light on glacier advances in the tropical Andes during the Younger Dryas. You can find the paper led by Neil Glasser @aberuni.bsky.social in Scientific Reports tinyurl.com/uwmt8rcn

We have a new preprint out reviewing the monitoring & detection of Svalbard surging glaciers: eartharxiv.org/repository/v...

We also compiled a new database of Svalbard's surge-type glaciers: zenodo.org/records/1524...

@dannipearce.bsky.social @hazlovell.bsky.social @adrianluckman.bsky.social

Large plenary meeting room at COP27. There are rows of desks, with people seated at the desks, facing a large stage with two big screens either side of it.

A diorama of 3 polar bears standing on a small iceberg, wearing orange lifejackets. One of them is looking at a penguin that appears to have been hanged.

Screenshot of text from The Times. It reads: "Then, this year, I arrived at the Glasgow Cop to see that the Qatar stand - the stand of the country with the highest per capita emissions in the world - was especially popular because it had the best coffee. The Indonesian stand had the best food but a stern sign saying you had to listen to a talk before eating. The Tuvalu stand, just beyond it, inexplicably has a diorama of polar bears lynching a penguin."

Are you an ECR working in some kind of cryosphere-related field? Are you interested in learning about international climate diplomacy and the COP process? Do you want to go to COP30 in Brazil in November? If yes, apply to volunteer with ICCI: iccinet.org/cop30-cryosp... It's an experience!

Small intrusions may help maintain Kīlauea’s lava lake - Bulletin of Volcanology We collected rapid-repeat radar data capturing the deformation of the active Halema‘uma‘u summit lava lake surface on January 19, 2023, an otherwise quiescent period during the January–March 2023 erup...

We were lucky enough to deploy a ground-based radar during one of Kīlauea’s 2023 eruptions and captured some interesting deformation signals — you can lear more about it in our open access paper, lead by USF graduate student Taha Sadeghi Chorsi!

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

New paper alert!

Holocene glacier and climate changes in central Patagonia.

Led by Carly Peltier. Also with @rlsoteres.bsky.social , and others...

authors.elsevier.com/c/1lN53-4PSD...

Continent-wide mapping shows increasing sensitivity of East Antarctica to meltwater ponding - Nature Climate Change This study provides a continent-wide assessment of surface meltwater area in Antarctica between 2006 and 2021, highlighting recent increases in magnitude and variability in East Antarctica, with indic...

I’m delighted to share that our new paper is now out in @natclimate.nature.com! Our long-term, monthly Antarctic-wide dataset of surface meltwater shows that the East Antarctic Ice Sheet is becoming increasingly prone to surface meltwater ponding.

People often think ice is 'millennial' in the Alps 🧊⏱️

It is not 🤔

Or in very small patches, very high up, and very close to the bedrock 🏔️

Look at this charred spruce needle fragment found at 73m deep, on top of Ortles (3859 m asl)

Iit is 2232 yr old! 🤩
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Birch Glacier and Blatten Landslide - AntarcticGlaciers.org The collapse of Birch Glacier and the devastating landslide that impacted the Swiss village of Blatten occurred as a result of supraglacial landslides.

The #Blatten Landslide and the role of climate change. As the lake builds up behind the landslide dam, this disaster continues to unfold. www.antarcticglaciers.org/2025/05/birc...

Warming of +1.5 °C is too high for polar ice sheets - Communications Earth & Environment Warming of +1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels is too high for the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, and even the current climate forcing of +1.2 °C is likely to lead to several meters of sea-level ...

⚠️New study shows that even warming of 1.5°C is too high to prevent long term global damage from the melt of Earth's polar ice sheets

🌊❄️

@geogdurham.bsky.social
@iccinet.bsky.social

www.nature.com/articles/s43...

The PGC were an invaluable resource during my PhD in the US and have been super helpful for the Thwaites project, too. This will be a huge loss for the polar science community, I hope they're able to survive and support US colleagues in the future

Absolutely devastating news. I haven't worked directly with them, but PGC has done such great work. ArcticDEM is a masterpiece of geospatial data.

North American ice sheets may have persisted into past warm periods --- and this matters for projections of future ice sheet mass loss.

Check out our new preprint! eartharxiv.org/repository/v...

With @bobkopp.net , @drandreadutton.bsky.social , and co.

Thanks, Sam!

Thank you! 😊😊

Thanks, Nathan!

Big shoes to fill!

After living in Louisiana and then London for the last 10 years, I'm chuffed about living close to this sort of scenery:

Please get in touch if you're interested in working together! Especially if you already have samples (better yet, quartz) that you'd love to have measured. Whilst my background is in glacial geology, I'm excited to branch out into fields like geomorphology, too!