Category: news

Discover which cryospheric research articles were most successful in attracting media attention in 2018 according to the Altmetric score.

Cryo Connect and Altmetric

Scientists are generally aware of each others’ studies. But when a scientific study generates media interest, its impact can be boosted beyond the scientific community. The media can push the essence of scientific study to the broader public through newspapers and news websites, television and social media. It all counts, and Altmetric tracks mentions of scientific studies across many media outlets.

Cryo Connect is all about boosting outreach communication in cryospheric sciences, and developing a joint EGU- and AGU-endorsed community outreach platform for cryospheric researchers. So we comb through Altmetric data each year to see which cryospheric studies are garnering top media coverage. Visit https://CryoConnect.net to learn how to help boost your cryospheric research, or simply tag @CryoConnect on Twitter.

Cryospheric Top 50

A Nature study that developed a consensus estimate of the mass balance of the Antarctic Ice Sheet garnered the most attention of any cryosphere study in 2018. This study was authored by the 80-author “IMBIE”, or Ice Sheet Mass Balance Inter-comparison Exercise, team. The second most media-featured cryosphere study of 2018 was a Science Advances study, which described an impact crater beneath the Hiawatha Glacier in Northwest Greenland, by Kurt Kjaer and 22 colleagues. The third most media-featured study of 2018 was a Nature study that documented a non-linear increase in meltwater runoff from the Greenland Ice Sheet since the industrial revolution, by Luke Tusel and eight colleagues.

The five most popular scientific journals of the top-50 list are: Nature Communications (9 studies), Geophysical Research Letters (8 studies), Nature (6 studies), and Science Advances and Nature Geoscience (5 studies each). Together, these five journals published two-thirds of the 50-top cryospheric science studies. Perhaps interestingly, Nature Communications and Science Advances are both relatively new journals — both less than eight years old — that provide gold open-access venues. Both EGU (The Cryosphere) and AGU (Geophysical Research Letters) journals are featured on the top-50 list.

There is a notable year-on-year increase in Altmetric scores comprising the top-50 list. At the low end, the rank #50 cut-off Altmetric score increased from 201 in 2017 to 292 in the 2018 list presented here. At the high end, the rank #1 Altmetric score increased from 1330 in 2017 to 3388 in 2018. Overall, the average top-50 Altmetric score increased from 442 in 2017 to 744 in 2018. We used the same methodology, described below, to generate the 2017 and 2018 top-50 lists.

It is difficult to precisely explain this year-on-year increase in Altmetric scores within the cryospheric sciences. There could be an increasing trend in cryosphere science coverage in the media, or improved detection of media coverage by Altmetric, or perhaps 2018 just had an unusually strong batch of cryospheric studies published. In any case, we congratulate all the authors of 2018’s top media-covered cryospheric studies on the well-deserved media attention that they have received, and the exposure they have given to cryospheric science!

Rank (Altmetric attention score)*	Publication title	Journal
1 (3388)	Mass balance of the Antarctic Ice Sheet from 1992 to 2017	Nature
2 (2873)	A large impact crater beneath Hiawatha Glacier in northwest Greenland	Science Advances
3 (1984)	Nonlinear rise in Greenland runoff in response to post-industrial Arctic warming	Nature
4 (1724)	Viable nematodes from late Pleistocene permafrost of the Kolyma River Lowland, Doklady	Biological Sciences
5 (1658)	Arctic sea ice is an important temporal sink and means of transport for microplastic	Nature Communications
6 (1654)	Exposed subsurface ice sheets in the Martian mid-latitudes	Science
7 (1504)	Direct evidence of surface exposed water ice in the lunar polar regions	Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
8 (1323)	Warm Arctic episodes linked with increased frequency of extreme winter weather in the United States	Nature Communications
9 (1305)	Net retreat of Antarctic glacier grounding lines	Nature Geoscience
10 (1014)	The Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets under 1.5 °C global warming	Nature Climate Change
11 (815)	Trends and connections across the Antarctic cryosphere	Nature
12 (790)	Permafrost stores a globally significant amount of mercury	Geophysical Research Letters
13 (740)	Near-surface environmentally forced changes in the Ross Ice Shelf observed with ambient seismic noise	Geophysical Research Letters
14 (729)	Reduced probability of ice-free summers for 1.5 °C compared to 2 °C warming	Nature Climate Change
15 (703)	21st-century modeled permafrost carbon emissions accelerated by abrupt thaw beneath lakes	Nature Communications
16 (700)	Observed rapid bedrock uplift in Amundsen Sea Embayment promotes ice-sheet stability	Science
17 (691)	Formation of metre-scale bladed roughness on Europa’s surface by ablation of ice	Nature Geoscience
18 (641)	On the propagation of acoustic–gravity waves under elastic ice sheets	Journal of Fluid Mechanics
19 (604)	The influence of Arctic amplification on mid-latitude summer circulation	Nature Communications
20 (599)	Topographic steering of enhanced ice flow at the bottleneck between East and West Antarctica	Geophysical Research Letters
21 (559)	Warming of the interior Arctic Ocean linked to sea ice losses at the basin margins	Science Advances
22 (516)	Evidence of an active volcanic heat source beneath the Pine Island Glacier	Nature Communications
23 (508)	Experimental evidence for superionic water ice using shock compression	Nature Physics
24 (506)	Variation in rising limb of Colorado River snowmelt runoff hydrograph controlled by dust radiative forcing in snow	Geophysical Research Letters
25 (491)	Vulnerability of Arctic marine mammals to vessel traffic in the increasingly ice-free Northwest Passage and Northern Sea Route	Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
26 (484)	Stopping the flood: could we use targeted geoengineering to mitigate sea level rise?	The Cryosphere
27 (469)	Limited influence of climate change mitigation on short-term glacier mass loss	Nature Climate Change
28 (468)	Degrading permafrost puts Arctic infrastructure at risk by mid-century	Nature Communications
29 (450)	Seismology gets under the skin of the Antarctic Ice Sheet	Geophysical Research Letters
30 (448)	Dark zone of the Greenland Ice Sheet controlled by distributed biologically-active impurities	Nature Communications
31 (444)	Freshening by glacial meltwater enhances melting of ice shelves and reduces formation of Antarctic Bottom Water	Science Advances
32 (423)	Ice core records of west Greenland melt and climate forcing	Geophysical Research Letters
33 (413)	Arctic warming hotspot in the northern Barents Sea linked to declining sea-ice import	Nature Climate Change
34 (406)	Path-dependent reductions in CO2 emission budgets caused by permafrost carbon release	Nature Geoscience
35 (403)	Discovery of a hypersaline subglacial lake complex beneath Devon Ice Cap, Canadian Arctic	Science Advances
36 (392)	Cascading lake drainage on the Greenland Ice Sheet triggered by tensile shock and fracture	Nature Communications
37 (345)	Global sea-level contribution from Arctic land ice: 1971–2017	Environmental Research Letters
38 (328)	Discovery of moganite in a lunar meteorite as a trace of H2O ice in the Moon’s regolith	Science Advances
39 (326)	The world’s largest High Arctic lake responds rapidly to climate warming	Nature Communications
40 (320)	Mass loss of Totten and Moscow University Glaciers, East Antarctica, using regionally optimized GRACE mascons	Geophysical Research Letters
41 (316)	A 400-Year ice core melt layer record of summertime warming in the Alaska Range	Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres
42 (314)	What drives 20th century polar motion?	Earth & Planetary Science Letters
43 (313)	Response of Pacific-sector Antarctic ice shelves to the El Niño/Southern Oscillation	Nature Geoscience
44 (308)	Dynamic response of Antarctic Peninsula Ice Sheet to potential collapse of Larsen C and George VI ice shelves	The Cryosphere
44 (308)	Increased West Antarctic and unchanged East Antarctic ice discharge over the last 7 years	The Cryosphere
46 (306)	Change in future climate due to Antarctic meltwater	Nature
47 (304)	Heterogeneous and rapid ice loss over the Patagonian Ice Fields revealed by CryoSat-2 swath radar altimetry	Remote Sensing of Environment
48 (303)	Antarctic ice shelf disintegration triggered by sea ice loss and ocean swell	Nature
49 (298)	Persistent polar ocean warming in a strategically geoengineered climate	Nature Geoscience
50 (292)	Ice loss from the East Antarctic Ice Sheet during late Pleistocene interglacials	Nature

*These Altmetric data were collected on 22 March 2019. As papers will continue to receive media attention, also as a result of this blog post, the Altmetric attention score and ranking are expected to change after this date.

Methodology

The top-50 cryospheric articles list was compiled using access to the Altmetric Explorer database provided by Altmetric. Similar to the 2017 top-50 list of cryospheric studies, we searched Altmetric Explorer for all peer-reviewed articles published between 1 January and 31 December 2018 that were within the field-of-research codes for Atmospheric Science (0401), Geochemistry (0402), Geology (0403), Geophysics (0404), Physical Geography and Environmental Science (0406), Environmental Science and Management (0502), Soil Sciences (0503) or Other Environmental Sciences (0599). We further limited qualifying articles to those with keywords of Antarctic, Arctic, Cryosphere, Firn, Frozen, Glacier, Glaciology, Ice, Iceberg, Permafrost, Polar and Snow. The resulting articles were then ranked by Altmetric score. Please contact us if you have questions about methodology or oversights.

This blog has been cross-posted on the EGU Cryospheric Sciences blog.

The media are crucial for the impact that scientific studies make. To discover which publications in scientific journals were most successful in attracting media attention, here we list the cryosphere science top 50 of papers published in 2017.

The efforts of scientific publishing

Scientists work for months, sometimes years even, to publish their findings in scientific journals. For cryosphere scientists, this work involves collecting observational data in the most extreme of environments, or handling huge datasets while attempting to filter out the information most essential to their research. After all this work is condensed into a handful of graphics, and described in a few thousand words rewritten over and over again for it to contain the maximum amount of factual information per page, the manuscripts are submitted to journals. These journals invite two or three other scientists (“peers”) to have a good look at the work, anonymously and unpaid, and advise the journal editor on whether the manuscript is worthy of publication. If it isn’t, the authors need to go back to the drawing board, and sometimes even start anew.

Although time consuming, and often utterly demotivating to those that entered science purely out of interest of unravelling nature’s mysteries, publication is a must for scientist. Without the journals as communication platforms, scientists’ work can go unnoticed even by fellow scientists.

Science making an impact

But getting noticed among scientists isn’t the ultimate goal. There is a large role for the media in getting the essence of the findings across to the larger public. Whether this is through newspapers, TV, blogs, Twitter, or Youtube, it all counts. Altmetric keeps an eye on many of these media outlets to assess the attention score of scientific publications, as a measure of how well they get noticed by the general public. And since Cryo Connect is all about boosting science communication, we compiled a list of the cryosphere publications receiving the most attention in the media in 2017. The colors of the Altmetric badges represent the different types of media coverage.

Top 50

The most media attention for any cryosphere study in 2017 went out to a publication in the renown journal Nature Geoscience on how changes in one of Canada’s largest glaciers caused an abrupt change in the regional drainage pattern of meltwater, written by Daniel H. Shugar and 6 colleagues. Second came a paper in Science Advances by Eric Larour and 2 others on how glacier meltwater affects sea-level rise differently across the planet. Third was a Nature Climate Change study on the “Influence of high-latitude atmospheric circulation changes on summertime Arctic sea ice” by Qinghua Ding with 10 contributing authors.

Seventy percent of all top-ranking papers were published in only 7 journals: Nature (8), Geophysical Research Letters (7), Nature Climate Change (6), Science Advances (4), Proceedings of the National Academy of the U.S.A. (4), Science (3), and the Journal of Glaciology (3). About 30% of all top-50 publications feature Antarctic ice. Considerable attention also goes out to the Arctic, to sea ice in particular. Five studies discuss extraterrestrial ice – more than the number of top-50 papers on mountain glaciers!

Here’s the list. We congratulate these publications’ (and all other) authors with the well-deserved media attention they received, after investing so much time and effort into trying to understand the immensely complicated system that is the cryosphere. Note that the Altmetric attention scores in this list will be updated automatically as the studies continue to receive more media attention.

Rank	Altmetric attention score	Publication title	Journal
1		River piracy and drainage basin reorganization led by climate-driven glacier retreat	Nature Geoscience
2		Should coastal planners have concern over where land ice is melting?	Science Advances
3		Influence of high-latitude atmospheric circulation changes on summertime Arctic sea ice	Nature Climate Change
4		Future loss of Arctic sea-ice cover could drive a substantial decrease in California’s rainfall	Nature Communications
5		Snow precipitation on Mars driven by cloud-induced night-time convection	Nature Geoscience
6		Climate change drives expansion of Antarctic ice-free habitat	Nature
7		An englacial hydrologic system of brine within a cold glacier: Blood Falls, McMurdo Dry Valleys, Antarctica	Journal of Glaciology
8		Widespread movement of meltwater onto and across Antarctic ice shelves	Nature
9		Increased nitrous oxide emissions from Arctic peatlands after permafrost thaw	Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the U.S.A.
10		Arctic ice management	Earth’s Future
11		Mass gains of the Antarctic ice sheet exceed losses	Journal of Glaciology
12		Decreasing cloud cover drives the recent mass loss on the Greenland Ice Sheet	Science Advances
13		Antarctic ice shelf potentially stabilized by export of meltwater in surface river	Nature
14		Evolving understanding of Antarctic ice-sheet physics and ambiguity in probabilistic sea-level projections	Earth’s Future
15		Recently amplified arctic warming has contributed to a continual global warming trend	Nature Climate Change
16		Massive blow-out craters formed by hydrate-controlled methane expulsion from the Arctic seafloor	Science
17		How much can we save? Impact of different emission scenarios on future snow cover in the Alps	The Cryosphere
18		Porosity and salt content determine if subduction can occur in Europa’s ice shell	Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets
19		Holocene variability in sea ice cover, primary production, and Pacific-Water inflow and climate change in the Chukchi and East Siberian Seas (Arctic Ocean)	Journal of Quaternary Science
20		Arctic sea-ice decline weakens the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation	Nature Climate Change
21		Industrial-age doubling of snow accumulation in the Alaska Range linked to tropical ocean warming	Scientific Reports
22		Evidence of marine ice-cliff instability in Pine Island Bay from iceberg-keel plough marks	Nature
23		Historically unprecedented global glacier decline in the early 21st century	Journal of Glaciology
24		Increasing frequency and duration of Arctic winter warming events	Geophysical Research Letters
25		Greater role for Atlantic inflows on sea-ice loss in the Eurasian Basin of the Arctic Ocean	Science
26		Impact of a global temperature rise of 1.5 degrees Celsius on Asia’s glaciers	Nature
27		Arctic sea ice, Eurasia snow, and extreme winter haze in China	Science Advances
28		Candidate volcanic and impact-induced ice depressions on Mars	Icarus
29		Impact crater morphology and the structure of Europa’s ice shell	Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets
30		The far reach of ice-shelf thinning in Antarctica	Nature Climate Change
31		Enhanced CO2 uptake at a shallow Arctic Ocean seep field overwhelms the positive warming potential of emitted methane	Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the U.S.A.
32		Effect of snow salinity on CryoSat-2 Arctic first-year sea ice freeboard measurements	Geophysical Research Letters
33		Initiation and long-term instability of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet	Nature
34		Influence of a West Antarctic mantle plume on ice sheet basal conditions	Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth
35		Preliminary paleoenvironmental analysis of permafrost deposits at Batagaika megaslump, Yana Uplands, northeast Siberia	Quaternary Research
36		Changes in Greenland’s peripheral glaciers linked to the North Atlantic Oscillation	Nature Climate Change
37		Wind causes Totten Ice Shelf melt and acceleration	Science Advances
38		Algae drive enhanced darkening of bare ice on the Greenland ice sheet	Geophysical Research Letters
39		Increased ice flow in Western Palmer Land linked to ocean melting	Geophysical Research Letters
40		West Antarctic Ice Sheet retreat driven by Holocene warm water incursions	Nature
41		Direct measurements of meltwater runoff on the Greenland ice sheet surface	Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the U.S.A.
42		The projected demise of Barnes Ice Cap: evidence of an unusually warm 21st century Arctic	Geophysical Research Letters
43		New evidence for surface water ice in small-scale cold traps and in three large craters at the north polar region of Mercury from the Mercury Laser Altimeter	Geophysical Research Letters
44		Localized rapid warming of West Antarctic subsurface waters by remote winds	Nature Climate Change
45		Asia’s glaciers are a regionally important buffer against drought	Nature
46		Abundant pre-industrial carbon detected in Canadian Arctic headwaters: implications for the permafrost carbon feedback	Environmental Research Letters
47		Cordilleran Ice Sheet mass loss preceded climate reversals near the Pleistocene Termination	Science
48		Channelized melting drives thinning under a rapidly melting Antarctic ice shelf	Geophysical Research Letters
49		Consequences of rapid ice sheet melting on the Sahelian population vulnerability	Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the U.S.A.
50		Mass budget of the glaciers and ice caps of the Queen Elizabeth Islands, Canada, from 1991 to 2015	Environmental Research Letters