Topic 1b: How Does the Cryosphere Help Us to Understand Climate Change?
In this audio lecture Professor David Vaughan, Director of Science at the British Antarctic Survey, introduces the ways in which the cryosphere can help us to understand climate change.
Elements of the cryosphere, such as ice sheets, glaciers and sea ice can act as early signals to the effects of climate change. They act as equilibrium systems - so when the climate changes, so do the glaciers.
However, the cryosphere has a seasonal cycle, so it is important that scientists are able to track seasonal patterns to identify how unusual changes might be taking place.
Additionally, from onboard the MOSAiC mission, Professor of Polar Observation and Modelling at UCL Julienne Stroeve introduces the ways that measuring the cryosphere is important in terms of the environment.
Featured Educator:
- Professor David Vaughan
CRYOSAT-2
Course topics
The core videos of this course are labelled as topic videos.
We have also provided a range of optional further reading, links, and additional resources to help consolidate your learning. Here is a summary of what is available:
Topic links and resources
In each topic, once you have watched the video and read the accompanying text, you will find the following information:
- Optional Further Reading: These are external links to further reading.
- Featured Images and Animations: Below the text on each video page, you’ll find the featured images and featured animations.
- Interactives: On the 'Interactives' tab on relevent topic pages, you will find a satellite tracking application showing the current location of the satellites, a data viewer from the ESA WEkEO platform, as well as a data viewer, specially created for this course, allowing you to explore a selection of data relevant to the themes and topics in this course. (Please note that due to maintenance, the data viewer is currently unavailable).
Quizzes and comments
- Quizzes: At the end of each week there will be a quizz consisting of around five questions. These will help you consolidate your understanding of new topics, but are not scored. The feedback given with each answer also will also provide you with important information.
Weekly interactive exercises
At the end of each week, we have included a guided exercise, using interactive apps available on other websites, to help you become more familiar with looking at and working with EO datasets. You will be guided through the process of searching for, comparing and drawing conclusions from data relevant to some of the topics covered in that week.
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