Past Events

The 75th Eastern Snow Conference (ESC) will be held at the NOAA Center for Weather and Climate Prediction, Climate Prediction Center in College Park, Maryland, USA, 5-8 June 2018.  The 75th ESC has a longer program than usual to allow for more sessions.  The program will also include an excursion on the Chesapeake Bay and Banquet in registration fee.  The scientific program is open to sessions on theoretical, experimental, remote sensing, modeling and operational studies of snow, ice, and winter hydrology.  We anticipate including sessions on historical perspectives of snow such as “Remote Sensing History”, “Data Preservation and Archiving” and “SnowEx”. This year’s general theme is “SNOW PAST, PRESENT and FUTURE”. The ESC has only plenary (oral and poster viewing) sessions, allowing time to view and discuss the research of each participant. You are invited to submit an abstract for an oral or a poster presentation (please indicate type). An abstract of 200-250 words should be submitted via email by March 16, 2018 to the Program Chairman.

We encourage you to submit abstracts to the GR01: PALEODUST ARCHIVES: OBSERVATIONAL CONSTRAINTS ON THE GLOBAL DUST CYCLE, convened by Samuel Albani, Natalie Mahowald, Valter Maggi and Thomas Stevens.

The session description reads as follow: "Mineral dust is a major component of the global atmospheric aerosol load. Dust emissions are influenced by climate change, and dust, in turn, can affect climate and biogeochemical cycles. Spatial and temporal variability of dust emissions and transport, as well as uncertainties in the particle size distributions and size-dependent physical and chemical properties, render dust an uncertain component of the climate system. Climate archives constitute natural dust samplers, and preserve precious information about past variability in the dust cycle. Under opportune circumstances, climate archives provide us with quantitative reconstructions of dust mass accumulation rates; when paired with additional information, such as measurements of particle size distributions, they have a great potential for reconstructing the global dust cycle. We invite contributions aimed at building up a quantitative observational reference framework from paleodust archives, as well as contributions from the modeling community with the potential to constrain and validate Earth System Models."

If you want to contribute to the scientific exchanges we will have, please do not hesitate to submit your abstract before Monday 20th January 2018. The session webpage, with the link for submissions, can be found here: ( https://www.dust2018.org/ ).

The EGU General Assembly 2018 will bring together geoscientists from all over the world to one meeting covering all disciplines of the Earth, planetary and space sciences. The EGU aims to provide a forum where scientists, especially early career researchers, can present their work and discuss their ideas with experts in all fields of geoscience.

The cryosphere is now acknowledged as a unique biome that, in spite of the cold and harsh conditions, is inhabited by a diverse range of micro- and macro-organisms. The organisms play important roles in the cycling of carbon, nutrients and other elements within and around the cryosphere. The cryosphere ecosystem is sensitive to recent climate change, such as changes in snow and ice cover under warming conditions. Melting and the crystallization of snow and ice are not purely physical phenomena, but are enhanced or even induced by the presence and activity of organisms. For example, supra-glacial microbes can darken and increase melting on glaciers and ice sheets, while some species of bacterium can act as ice nucleators. Microorganisms have also been shown to be important in englacial systems and beneath glaciers and ice sheets. Biological processes on, within and under the ice are still insufficiently understood, and therefore not well considered in present models of the Earth system. Most organisms in the cryosphere are physiologically adapted to low temperatures and an improved understanding of these mechanisms has great potential for application to agriculture, food science, medical and material engineering. This symposium will provide an opportunity for glaciologists and biologists to meet each other to discuss the various phenomena of life in the cold. The goals of this symposium are: (1) to provide a forum for presenting the current knowledge of life and ecosystems in the cryosphere; (2) to discuss the important gaps in our understanding of interactions between biological activity and physical/ chemical phenomena in the cryosphere, from molecular to system level; and (3) to encourage participants to form a new scientific community, discussing the state and direction of glacial-biology or bio-glaciology.

The 22nd Alpine Glaciology/Glaciologist Meeting (AGM) will be held in Chamonix (France), Thursday 1 and Friday 2 March 2018. The meeting will be held at ENSA/Chamonix (Ecole Nationale de Ski et d’Alpinisme). As usual, this meeting serves as informal exchange platform for researchers working on snow, glaciers or permafrost: glacier mass balance, ice-flow observations and modelling, ice geophysics, instrumentation.

The 14th International Conference on the Physics and Chemistry of Ice (PCI- 2018) will take place in Zürich (Switzerland) during the 2nd week in January 2018. This international symposium series dates back 55 years and is devoted to research on all aspects of ice. The broad field of topics is linked by the focus on fundamentals.

Topics include: Ice and Life (near and far, far away); Surfaces, Interfaces and Nucleation; Ice Phases, Amorphous Ice and Glass Transitions; Crystal Growth; Microstructure and Mechanics; and Cryospheric Processes (from glaciological friction, deformation and damage mechanics, snow dynamics and photochemistry to sea ice thermodynamics).

TH23H: Scientific Drilling in the Polar Regions

Ice sheets, glaciers, and the underlying bedrock, sediment and permafrost hold crucial evidence of past climate, ice sheet extent, and cratonic geology. National and international collaboration for drilling in the remote polar regions requires strategic coordination between science, technology, and logistics. This meeting will provide the research community with updates on IDPO-IDDO, IPICS, IPA, RAID, and SALSA drilling initiatives. Opportunities for community involvement will be showcased, and input from the audience will be solicited.

Fall Meeting is the largest and preeminent Earth and space science meeting in the world. The 2017 Fall Meeting will take place in New Orleans, Louisiana, offering attendees the chance to discover a new location that features world-renowned cuisine, music, arts, and culture, and provides access to vital scientific ecosystems.

Fall Meeting will offer a unique mix of more than 20,000 oral and poster presentations, a broad range of keynote lectures, various types of formal and informal networking and career advancement opportunities, scientific field trips around New Orleans, and an exhibit hall packed with hundreds of exhibitors.

The FRISP meeting is an opportunity for scientists working on ice shelf processes to meet in an informal setting and to exchange ideas, results and field plans. Presentations on all aspects of ice shelf research are welcome, including, but not limited to:

• formation, flow and disintegration of ice shelves and tidewater glaciers
• response of ice shelves and tidewater glaciers to past, present and future climate variability
• surface and basal mass balance of ice shelves
• ice-ocean interaction at the calving front of ice shelves and tidewater glaciers
• mass transport across the grounding line
• ocean circulation and water mass transformation beneath ice shelves and within pro-glacial fjords
• impact of ice shelves on the global ocean
• processes controlling the delivery of ocean heat to glaciated coastlines
• climate records from on or near current or former ice shelves
• iceberg calving, drift, melting, and decay

The EGU General Assembly 2017 was again a great success with 4,849 oral, 11,312 poster, and 1,238 PICO presentations. 649 unique scientific sessions together with 88 short courses and 322 side events created an interesting programme. At the conference 14,496 scientists from 107 countries participated, of which 53% were under the age of 35 years, 15,000 copies of EGU Today distributed, keen media presence and reporting, and thousands of visits to the webstreams as well as to the EGU blog GeoLog.