On this Earth Day, as we reflect on the global impact our school and the department of ESS have had on climate change studies, we launch a climate change series that examines what the future holds for Earth science research given the many shifts caused by the pandemic.

Please join UCI Sustainability for their week of Earth Day events! Please find the full programming schedule here.

ESS will still be offering courses for Summer Session 2020! In Summer Session I, the Department will offer ESS 3: Oceanography and ESS 5: Earth's Atmosphere; and it will offer ESS 1: Intro to Earth System Science and ESS 15: Introduction to Global Climate Change for Summer Session II.

Greenland Ice Melt Shows Why Global Warming Matters

The COVID-19 pandemic is wreaking havoc on countries around the world, causing a global health crisis while forcing economies to shut down in the face of strict quarantine measures. But the outbreak is also having an intriguing impact on Earth's environment, as nations restrict the movement of people.

It's getting warmer down at the bottom of the world.

As the global climate heats up, some of the great ice sheets and glaciers in Antarctica are melting, a few of them rapidly. One, East Antarctica’s Denman glacier, has retreated nearly 3 miles in just the past 22 years, according to a new study. 

The more the glacier’s grounding line backs down the slope, the thicker the ice becomes. This means the ice can flow outward faster and also that more of it will be exposed to ocean waters capable of melting it. “In this configuration, it means that once the glacier starts retreating, it’s very hard to stop it,” said [Earth system science Professor] Eric Rignot of the University of California, Irvine, one of the study’s authors. “You sort of open the floodgates.”

UCI, NASA scientists assess ice sheet with potential to raise global sea levels nearly 5 feet

Last year proved to be an exceptionally warm summer in the Arctic as Greenland lost 600 billion tons of ice, which is enough to hike the global sea levels by 2.2 millimeters in two months, according to the study.

“We knew this past summer had been particularly warm in Greenland, melting every corner of the ice sheet, but the numbers are enormous,” said lead author Isabella Velicogna, an Earth system science professor at the University of California at Irvine and a senior scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in a news release. The mass loss from Greenland alone was enough to raise global sea levels by 2.2 millimeters, the study found.