Glaciation refers to the climatic and geophysical processes leading to the formation, expansion, and persistence of glaciers and ice sheets, and their subsequent sculpting of the Earth’s surface. It encompasses large-scale cooling, snow accumulation exceeding ablation, and dynamic ice flow driven by gravity and basal sliding. Glaciation cycles, governed primarily by orbital forcing (Milankovitch cycles), greenhouse gas concentrations, and feedbacks involving albedo and ocean circulation, produce glacial–interglacial variations in global climate. These events generate diagnostic landforms (e.g., moraines, drumlins, U-shaped valleys) and stratigraphic signatures, and they are central topics in Quaternary science, paleoclimatology, and Earth system modeling.
For the past several years, Penn State geoscientist Sarah Ivory and her students have been among a team of scientists scaling the East African Rwenzori Mountains, collecting sediment core samples from lakes formed at the ...
Earth Sciences
May 30, 2026
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A new study published in the journal Nature Geoscience by researchers at the IBS Center for Climate Physics (ICCP) at Pusan National University in South Korea shows that the Antarctic ice sheet became more sensitive to climate ...
Earth Sciences
May 28, 2026
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About a billion years ago, Earth started to come into its own. It was past the awkwardness of its younger years full of growing pains and turmoil: comet strikes and slimy water, including the Great Oxidation Event that flipped ...
A decade ago, Bradley Markle, an assistant professor at the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research at the University of Colorado Boulder, noticed an odd pattern while sifting through temperature records from the end of the ...
Earth Sciences
May 27, 2026
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From the Kleines Nesthorn to Pizzo Cengalo, the Alps appear to be crumbling. Permafrost researcher Robert Kenner has penned a summary explaining the role that thawing permafrost and melting glaciers play—or don't play—in ...
Earth Sciences
May 26, 2026
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Buffalo's legendary snowfall totals are largely the result of one unlucky geographic reality: the city sits east of the Great Lakes instead of west. Anyone who has lived through a winter in Buffalo, Cleveland or any snowbelt ...
Earth Sciences
May 13, 2026
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Researchers at the University of Bristol have developed a new method which could help scientists perform large-scale climate simulations at a fraction of the cost and time needed compared to traditional climate models. The ...
Earth Sciences
May 13, 2026
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On the evening of Aug. 9, 2025, passengers on the Hanse Explorer finished taking selfies and videos of the South Sawyer Glacier, and the ship headed back down the fjord. Twelve hours later, a landslide from the adjacent mountain ...
Earth Sciences
May 10, 2026
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In a new paper, an international team led by scientists from Charles University, Czechia, has brought evidence linking widespread release of methane (CH₄)—a strong greenhouse gas—from the Greenland Ice Sheet (GrIS) to a warmer ...
Earth Sciences
May 5, 2026
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Imagine your favorite sunny beach. Anywhere will do. You look out and see the ocean stretching to the horizon. To a glaciologist, that view is not just water; it's melted ice. Our new study shows that the best case sea-level ...
Earth Sciences
Apr 24, 2026
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