Recently, climate extremes have been grabbing attention as important drivers of environmental change. Here, we assemble an observational inventory of energy and mass fluxes to quantify the ice loss from glaciers on the Russian High Arctic archipelago of Novaya Zemlya. Satellite altimetry reveals that 70 ± 19% of the 149 ± 29 Gt mass loss between 2011 and 2022 occurred in just four high-melt years. We find that 71 ± 3% of the melt, including the top melt cases, are driven by extreme energy imports from atmospheric rivers. The majority of ice loss occurs on leeward slopes due to foehn winds. 45 of the 54 high-melt days (>1 Gt d−1) in 1990 to 2022 show a combination of atmospheric rivers and foehn winds. Therefore, the frequency and intensity of atmospheric rivers demand accurate representation for reliable future glacier melt projections for the Russian High Arctic.@en

Our awareness of ice caps' and mountain glaciers' sensitivity to climate change has driven major advances in the application of remote sensing techniques during the past decade. Regarding ESA's SARIn altimeter CryoSat-2, processing the full waveform to generate swaths of elevation estimates has become standard practice in regions of complex topographies. This technique provides information on areas where we would be blind otherwise. In this article, we discuss systematic errors and analyze their impact on surface elevation measurements and change rates of two test areas. In particular, we focus on periodically occurring errors in elevation swaths, caused by the superposition of coherent signals from range-ambiguous surfaces. They can lead to measurement errors in excess of 10 m, affect most measurements in mountainous regions, are difficult to exclude with established post-processing techniques, and occur repeatedly for satellite revisits introducing a 369-day periodicity-difficult to distinguish from the annual cycle. We show a correlation between derived elevation swaths and the sensor view angle and explore the influence of common data exclusion choices on higher level products. Our results indicate that these systematic errors hold a substantial share of the error budget and that the choice of thresholds impacts higher level products. We conclude that error correlations need to be considered to characterize the data accuracy. With the established data editing strategies, systematic errors prevent resolving seasonal mass changes of single mountain glacier basins and impact aggregates over larger areas or longer periods.

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Icelandic glaciers have been losing mass since the Little Ice Age in the mid-to-late 1800s, with higher mass loss rates in the early 21st century, followed by a slowdown since 2011. As of yet, it remains unclear whether this mass loss slowdown will persist in the future. By reconstructing the contemporary (1958–2019) surface mass balance of Icelandic glaciers, we show that the post-2011 mass loss slowdown coincides with the development of the Blue Blob, an area of regional cooling in the North Atlantic Ocean to the south of Greenland. This regional cooling signal mitigates atmospheric warming in Iceland since 2011, in turn decreasing glacier mass loss through reduced meltwater runoff. In a future high-end warming scenario, North Atlantic cooling is projected to mitigate mass loss of Icelandic glaciers until the mid-2050s. High mass loss rates resume thereafter as the regional cooling signal weakens.

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The stability of the Greenland Ice Sheet under global warming is governed by a number of dynamic processes and interacting feedback mechanisms in the ice sheet, atmosphere and solid Earth. Here we study the long-term effects due to the interplay of the competing melt-elevation and glacial isostatic adjustment (GIA) feedbacks for different temperature step forcing experiments with a coupled ice-sheet and solid-Earth model. Our model results show that for warming levels above 2 C, Greenland could become essentially ice-free within several millennia, mainly as a result of surface melting and acceleration of ice flow. These ice losses are mitigated, however, in some cases with strong GIA feedback even promoting an incomplete recovery of the Greenland ice volume. We further explore the full-factorial parameter space determining the relative strengths of the two feedbacks: our findings suggest distinct dynamic regimes of the Greenland Ice Sheets on the route to destabilization under global warming - from incomplete recovery, via quasi-periodic oscillations in ice volume to ice-sheet collapse. In the incomplete recovery regime, the initial ice loss due to warming is essentially reversed within 50000years, and the ice volume stabilizes at 61-93 of the present-day volume. For certain combinations of temperature increase, atmospheric lapse rate and mantle viscosity, the interaction of the GIA feedback and the melt-elevation feedback leads to self-sustained, long-term oscillations in ice-sheet volume with oscillation periods between 74000 and over 300000 years and oscillation amplitudes between 15-70 of present-day ice volume. This oscillatory regime reveals a possible mode of internal climatic variability in the Earth system on timescales on the order of 100000years that may be excited by or synchronized with orbital forcing or interact with glacial cycles and other slow modes of variability. Our findings are not meant as scenario-based near-term projections of ice losses but rather providing insight into of the feedback loops governing the "deep future"and, thus, long-term resilience of the Greenland Ice Sheet.

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Icelandic glaciers have been losing mass since the Little Ice Age in the mid-to-late 1800s, with higher mass loss rates in the early 21st century, followed by a slowdown since 2011. As of yet, it remains unclear whether this mass loss slowdown will persist in the future. By reconstructing the contemporary (1958–2019) surface mass balance of Icelandic glaciers, we show that the post-2011 mass loss slowdown coincides with the development of the Blue Blob, an area of regional cooling in the North Atlantic Ocean to the south of Greenland. This regional cooling signal mitigates atmospheric warming in Iceland since 2011, in turn decreasing glacier mass loss through reduced meltwater runoff. In a future high-end warming scenario, North Atlantic cooling is projected to mitigate mass loss of Icelandic glaciers until the mid-2050s. High mass loss rates resume thereafter as the regional cooling signal weakens.@en