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Historian brings icy climate warnings and warm personal memories.

Antarctica is increasingly popular as a site for tourism and scientific research. The growth of marine traffic and the presence of major research stations have increased the anthropogenic deposition of heavy metals into this fragile ecosystem.

How volcanoes and the cryosphere interact is of interest for understanding hazard mitigation at ice-clad volcanoes and for paleoclimate studies. Here, the authors provide quantitative details from an eruption in Kamchatka, demonstrating that two kinds of lava, ′a′a and pahoehoe, produced different snowpack responses.

Ice sublimation is a common, yet little-studied, heat and mass transfer problem with climatic and industrial implications. Here, the authors show that the sublimation of ice crystals is purely diffusive and is unaffected by the underlying crystalline lattice.

Summer snow accumulation and its albedo effect on Arctic sea ice are controlled by the Arctic Oscillation atmospheric circulation pattern, according to a combined modelling and remote sensing analysis.

Remote sensing observations of mountain snow depth are still lacking for the Northern Hemisphere mountains. Here authors use Sentinel-1 satellite radar measurements to assess the snow depth in mountainous areas at 1 km² resolution and show that the Sentinel-1 retrievals capture the spatial variability between and within mountain ranges, as well as their inter-annual differences.

Adding snowpack measurements at strategic locations outperforms spatially complete surveys for water supply prediction, outlining a cost-effective strategy for improving water supply forecasts that combines existing networks and targeted expansion.

A shift in summer atmospheric circulation has accelerated Greenland Ice Sheet melt. The authors show that diminished North American snow cover supports these conditions by inducing a stationary Rossby wave that favors high pressure over Greenland.

Snow cover can affect the Arctic sea-ice system in different ways. Here authors study the relationship between cyclone activity and the seasonal build-up of snow on Arctic sea ice at a multi-decadal and basin-wide scale and find that 44% of the variability in monthly snow accumulation was controlled by cyclone snowfall and 29% by sea-ice freeze-up with strong spatio-temporal differences.

Fine sea salt aerosols produced by blowing snow in the Arctic impact cloud properties and warm the surface, according to observations from the MOSAiC expedition.

Future changes and regional differences in snowpacks are unclear. Here the American Cordillera mountain range, spanning the Americas, is estimated to lose snow faster in the southern midlatitudes—global warming should be limited to below 2.5 °C to prevent low-to-no-snow conditions across the range.

River floods that occur simultaneously in multiple locations can lead to higher damages than individual events. Here, the authors show that the likelihood of concurrent high river discharge has increased over the last decades.

From 1979 to 2022, warm snow droughts have become a dominant driver of snowpack depletion on the Tibetan Plateau, dry and warm snow droughts trigger compound dry-hot and pluvial-hot extremes divergent heat-moisture regulation pathways, according to multisource remote sensing and reanalysis data analysis.

High-mountain Asia streamflow is strongly impacted by snow and glacier melt. A regional model, combined with observations and climate projections, shows snowmelt decreased during 1979–2019 and was more dominant than glacier melt, and projections suggest declines that vary by river basin.

Sanguina nivaloides thrives in red snowfields worldwide. It cannot be cultivated. Using environmental samples, 3D electron microscopy combined with functional analyzes revealed unique cell architecture features adapted to life in a snowy environment.

Mountain snowpack declines are often tracked using snow water equivalent trends sensitive to highly variable precipitation. Observational work proposes temperature-driven daily snowmelt during the accumulation season as an alternative metric, with increases that are three times more widespread.

Dust deposition in high-mountain Asia lowers snow albedo and hastens melt. Satellite data and models show that dust arrives via transport in elevated aerosol layers and outweighs black carbon impacts at high altitudes, suggesting a growing importance of dust on snowmelt as snowlines rise with warming.

Land surface models often use a spatially uniform air temperature threshold when partitioning rain and snow. Here Jennings et al. show that the threshold varies significantly across the Northern Hemisphere and that threshold selection is a large source of uncertainty in snowfall simulations.

Red-snow algae are red-pigmented unicellular algae that appear seasonally on the surface of thawing snow worldwide. Here, Segawa et al. analyse nuclear ITS2 sequences from snow algae from the Arctic and Antarctica, identifying dominant phylotypes present in both poles as well as endemic organisms.

Increased surface temperatures are expected to cause less precipitation in the form of snow. The impact of decreased snowfall has previously been assumed to not influence streamflow significantly. This work applies a water-balance framework to catchments in the United States and finds a greater percentage of precipitation as snowfall is associated with greater mean streamflow.

Tigers are an endangered species and therefore understanding their genetic architecture could aid conservation efforts. Here, the authors report the first genome sequence of the Amur tiger and, through close species comparative genomic analysis, provide insight into the genome organization, evolutionary divergence and diversity of big cats.

Avalanches can occur when a porous snow layer lies beneath a dense cohesive snow slab. Field experiments and simulations now reveal different crack-propagation regimes in slab avalanches, similar to rupture propagation following an earthquake.

Phenoliferia psychrophenolica, isolated from red snow, harbors a genome rich in ice-binding proteins and carbohydrate-active enzymes, and metabolizes pigments from snow and glacier algae, potentially linking the decline of algal blooms to cryospheric carbon fluxes.

Climate change will affect Himalayan water resources. This study quantifies the importance of snow and glacier melt for agriculture on the Indo-Gangetic plain, finding that 129 million farmers depend on it, especially for rice and cotton, and that meltwater supports crops feeding 38 million people.

The potential contribution of high altitude permafrost as a climate feedback is unknown. Here the authors show seven years of sustained carbon emissions from snow-scoured alpine tundra including respiration of older carbon substrate from solifluction lobes associated with permafrost during the winter.

Ephemeral snow and ice melt contribute substantially to dry season runoff in the Rio Santa basin, with snowmelt accounting for up to 55% and ice melt up to 44% of inputs, according to results from a distributed glacio-hydrological model applied to quantify cryospheric contributions to the Andean water cycle.

In the Arctic spring, sunlight-induced reactions convert gaseous elemental mercury into compounds that are rapidly deposited on the snowpack. Analysis of the isotopic composition of mercury in snow samples collected during an atmospheric mercury depletion event suggests that sunlight triggers the re-emission of mercury from the snowpack.

The authors link a recent collapse of a commercially valuable snow crab stock to borealization of the Bering Sea that is >98% likely to have been human induced.

Snow accumulation is critical for water availability in the Northern Hemisphere. Model projections show a shift towards low snow years, with areas of western North America, northeastern Europe and the Greater Himalayas showing the strongest decline. Many snow-dependent regions are likely to experience increasing stress from low snow years if global warming exceeds 2° above the pre-industrial baseline.

Anticrack propagation in snow results from the mixed-mode failure and collapse of a buried weak layer and can lead to slab avalanches. Here, authors reproduce the complex dynamics of anticrack propagation observed in field experiments using a Material Point Method with large strain elastoplasticity.

It has been argued that air temperatures over mountain glaciers are decoupled from surrounding warming, which could slow down melting. Here the authors show that this effect will weaken with future glacier retreat, leading to a recoupling of temperatures from the 2030s onwards.

The snow-line is the distance from a protostar at which a particular volatile gas condenses; images of the protostar V883 Ori suggest that the water snow-line migrated outwards during a protostellar outburst, with implications for our understanding of the formation of planetary systems such as our own.