Isabella Velicogna's office in UC Irvine's Croul Hall looks like it belongs to an artist instead of a university scientist. Her paintings and drawings — including charming sketches of mice — adorn the walls, and colorful, handcrafted mobiles dangle from the ceiling.

For the last half-baked seminar before spring break Tyler Sutterley has kindly agreed to present some of his ongoing work on:

Working to Reconcile Ice Sheet Mass Balance

As usual this will be at 4p.m. on Friday in Rm 3101 so come and celebrate the end of the winter quarter. Refreshments will be available!

The vast ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica are melting faster than previously estimated and that melting is accelerating, according to a new report that verifies 18 years of melting via two independent techniques.

Using satellite data, UC Irvine and NASA hydrologists have found that groundwater beneath northern India has been receding by as much as 1 foot per year over the past decade - and they believe human consumption is almost entirely to blame.

More than 109 cubic kilometers (26 cubic miles) of groundwater disappeared from the region's aquifers between 2002 and 2008 - double the capacity of India's largest surface-water reservoir, the Upper Wainganga, and triple that of Lake Mead, the largest manmade reservoir in the U.S.

Glaciers in West Greenland are melting 100 times more rapidly at their end points beneath the ocean than they are at their surfaces, according to a UC Irvine/NASA study published online this week in Nature Geoscience.

The study results suggest this undersea melting caused by warmer water is playing an important, if not dominant, role in the evolution of Greenland’s glaciers – a factor that had previously been overlooked.