Simon Cook 🏔❄🌊

Trump should return to his Scottish roots and take my Polar Environments course @dundeeuni.bsky.social 🐧 The penguin is even our university mascot…because of Dundee’s links to ANTARCTICA

We found:
▶️ Bolivian glaciers shrank by ~9%, 2016-2022
▶️ Glacial lakes grew in number & size as ice receded
▶️ 11 lakes are highly susceptible to generating a glacial lake outburst flood (GLOF)
▶️ Analysis of subglacial topography reveals that 55 lakes could emerge as glacier continue to recede

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Landscape image of the Cordillera Apolobamba, Bolivia, 2015

❄️ 💧 New paper out in @igsoc.bsky.social Journal of Glaciology: "Monitoring glacier evolution and assessing glacial lake outburst flood (GLOF) susceptibility in the Bolivian Andes"

lnkd.in/e2tWUXeu

#glaciers #climatechange #climate #andes #glofs #Bolivia

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Clovid

High frequency of moraine-dammed lake outburst floods driven by global warming - Nature Communications The study presents an updated global inventory of glacial lake outburst floods, revealing a sharp rise in event frequency since the 1980s and a strong delayed link to climate warming, highlighting gro...

High frequency of glacial lake outburst floods (GLOF) driven by global warming

Overall, the long-term trajectory of reported GLOF frequency closely parallels variations in global air temperature, exhibiting a lag-correlated pattern on timescales of ~20 years.

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

🧊 The lag comes from the time taken for glacier retreat to form a lake, and also the destabilisation of surrounding valley walls due to glacier debuttressing and permafrost degradation (~70% of GLOFs are triggered by ice avalanches and landslides into lakes)

📌We built upon & revised existing GLOF inventories worldwide, generating a list of >600 GLOFs between 1900 and 2020, which we analysed.

🌡️ We found that global GLOF frequency has increased markedly since the late 20th century, with a lagged response time to rising temperatures of ~5 to 20 years

🏔️NEW in @natcomms.nature.com: “High frequency of moraine-dammed lake outburst floods driven by global warming”

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

🤔There’s been lots of uncertainty about whether the number of glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFs) has increased, decreased or flatlined in recent decades

📘 New paper: Post-Little Ice Age Shrinkage of the Tsaneri–Nageba Glacier System and Recent Proglacial Lake Evolution in the Georgian Caucasus

📉Glacier shrank ~43% since ~1820
🌊Lake grew from ~14,000m² in 2015 to ~107,900 m² 2025
⚠️Hazard + water resources implications

www.mdpi.com/2073-4441/17...

Lie-gel

A group of over 40 people stand listening to speeches at the front of the Tower Building at the University of Dundee. The people are on a picket line for Dundee Universities and College Union. Many are wearing pink hats with ‘UCU’ on the front.

Very strong turnout this morning on the first of our five days strike.

On Friday, in a meeting with the interim Principal, he confirmed his ideology is to cut as many jobs as possible.

Support our action to save jobs and save the University!

#SaveHE #SaveDundeeUni #WeAreTheUniversity

These low-angle glacier detachments are, mercifully, rare, but can be incredibly destructive. Good review here, though several events since it was published in 2021: tc.copernicus.org/articles/15/...

UTTERLY SURREAL LOW ANGLE GLACIER SLIDE!! 😮😱

On Saturday at 11:00 am, a 2 km-long, 25 m-high, and 150-200 m in width section detached off the Ismoil Somoni Glacier (Tajikistan) and slid down the gorge! 🧊🌊

asiaplustj.info/en/node/354309
📽️ via @volcaholic1

Fractal nature of everything

Random thought. Thailand could pass for a glacier. Nice wide accumulation zone (though struggling in the mid section)

Storm Amy has been record breaking ⚠️

An air pressure of 947.9 hPa was recorded at Baltasound, Shetland, provisionally setting a new UK lowest pressure record for October.

Northern Ireland provisionally recorded its strongest October wind gust on record, with a gust of 92 mph at Magilligan.

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

Several failed geocaches along the way, but the views were worth it

Left high and dry, this former glacial meltwater channel was carved into the Sidlaw Hills just north of Dundee by the last ice sheet to occupy this region ~20,000 years ago. It’s one of several that i’ve been mapping with students & colleagues over the last couple of years.

Summer 2025 is the warmest on record for the UK Provisional Met Office statistics confirm that summer 2025 is officially the warmest summer on record for the UK.

Met Office stats confirm summer 2025 is officially the warmest summer on record for the UK.

The UK’s mean temp of 16.10°C surpasses the previous record of  15.76°C and pushes the summer of 1976 out of the top 5 warmest summers.

www.metoffice.gov.uk/about-us/new...

Northwest Scotland is hard to beat

The extent of the deposit from the Birch Glacier collapse over Blatten as seen by newly available high-resolution satellite imagery collected by Maxar! 🛰️

Processed by @wxnb.bsky.social

First heli inspection of what remains of Blatten yesterday evening... 🚁😱🌊

SHOCKING!

Few buildings left are flooded
Little debris flow run through the deposit
Look at the height reached on the counterslope! 😮

🎥 Pomona

The front of the Birch Glacier prior to the catastrophic collapse on 28 May 2025. Image from Pomona Media.

On 28 May 2025, the Birch Glacier in Switzerland catastrophically failed, generating a massive landslide that has partially buried Blatten. So what happens next?
eos.org/thelandslide...

Link here if you are so inclined: www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/...

22:55-ish

NOT VERIFIED, an approximate polygon drawn from media images shows the extent of the Birch glacier collapse above Blatten.

The location of the Lonza River gauge station in Blatten (now out of order)

last 40 days of the Lonza River discharge at Blatten, light blue, about 5m3/s on average

Average flow of the Lonza River at Blatten over the last 30 years. It shows a significant increase from May (average 5.7 m3/s) to June (average 11 m3/s)

Maybe >~100 🏠 buried by the glacier+rockfall collapse in Blatten (polygon quickly drawn from 📷 pomona.ch). Upstream part of village spared. But the Lonza River is now dammed. Over the last month it flew at ~5m3/s, expected to increase 2-3x in June. At 10 m3/s, it's 1M m3 every 28 hours.

Swiss glacier collapse buries most of village of Blatten - BBC News Many homes in Blatten have been flattened after a large chunk of the Birch glacier fell on to the village.

I’ll be on @bbc5live.bsky.social at about 10:45pm UK time tonight discussing the Birch Glacier collapse and the impacts on Blatten, Swiss Alps.

Looks to be a dangerous secondary hazard developing with the blockage of the Lonza River.

#blatten #birchglacier #glacier

www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

SPEECHLESS BEFORE / AFTER #BLATTEN

The magnitude of destruction after the 3:24 pm collapse of Birch Glacier is immense! 😱

All the forest has been razed and the ice/wood/debris dammed the Lonza river 🌊

Some buildings of Blatten are buried 🏠

📷 Pomona

Swiss glacier collapse destroys parts of village Numerous homes in Blatten devastated after huge cloud of ice and rubble inundates evacuated town

❄️🏔️⚠️ Glacier collapse in the Swiss Alps has partially destroyed the village of Blatten, which thankfully had been evacuated already.

#glacier #landslide #geohazard

www.theguardian.com/world/2025/m...

Fair enough. I should be doing something useful on a Saturday evening rather than being in forever-marking mode