Friday, 10 July 2026

About 4km of the Pine Island glacier's retreat, or roughly a fifth of the total, traces to climate change, according to a study in the Cryosphere reported by Carbon Brief. The authors describe it as the first attribution study of glacier retreat on Antarctica.

The Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers together account for almost half the sea level rise driven by Antarctic ice-sheet melt, according to Carbon Brief. Pine Island alone has contributed a fifth of net ice loss from the West Antarctic ice sheet, and that ice sheet drives almost all of Antarctica's ice loss over the past 40 years.

Sediment records place the start of the glacier's retreat in the 1940s, according to Carbon Brief. The timing lines up with a strong El Nino, a recurring tropical Pacific pattern that pushed a large pulse of warm water toward the ice sheet.

Climate reconstructions point to the 1960s as the moment human-caused warming began lifting the volume of warm water reaching the West Antarctic ice sheet, according to Carbon Brief. That puts the human fingerprint about 20 years behind the retreat that was already underway.

Deeper in the record, the West Antarctic ice sheet has pulled back roughly 500km since the last glacial maximum around 20,000 years ago, with most of that retreat falling between 10,000 and 20,000 years ago, according to Carbon Brief.

The Cottonwood Fire in southwest Utah's Tushar Mountains was the largest active blaze in the U.S. at around 94,000 acres as of Tuesday morning, according to Inside Climate News.

The National Interagency Fire Center escalated the country's preparedness level to the second-highest designation on Monday, which the organization said essentially means all hands are on deck. More than 8,200 personnel are assigned to active fire incidents nationwide as of Tuesday, and 83 new fires were reported on Monday, Inside Climate News reported.

The Cottonwood Fire led the national tally at roughly 94,000 acres. The Snyder Fire near the Colorado-Utah border has burned more than 30,000 acres and killed three firefighters, according to Inside Climate News.

Colorado Governor Jared Polis declared a disaster emergency on Saturday in response to the Snyder Fire, authorizing use of the National Guard.

In south central Colorado, thousands of households were told to evacuate on Monday as the Aspen Acres Fire grew to more than 20,000 acres in a matter of hours, Inside Climate News reported.

The Trump administration has launched a reorganization of federal fire forces under the Department of the Interior to combine them into a new U.S. Wildland Fire Service.