In the wintertime Arctic, cracks in the ice called “leads” expose the warm ocean directly to the cold air, with some leads only a few meters wide and some kilometers wide. They play a critical role in the Arctic surface energy balance. If we want to know how much the ice is going to grow […]

The Arctic is melting faster than we thought it would. In fact, Arctic ice extent is at a record low. When that happens—when a natural system behaves differently than scientists expect—it’s time to take another look at how we understand the system. University of Utah mathematician Ken Golden and atmospheric scientist Court Strong study the […]

In 1870, explorer Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld, trekking across the barren and remote ice cap of Greenland, saw something most people wouldn’t expect in such an empty, inhospitable landscape: haze. Nordenskiöld’s record of the haze was among the first evidence that air pollution around the northern hemisphere can travel toward the pole and degrade air quality […]