Press release

Published on November 13, 2023
Alert press CNRS

The largest floating ice shelves in the polar ice sheet have lost more than a third of their volume since 1978. In a study to be published on 7 November in Nature Communications, scientists from the Institut des géosciences de l’environnement (IGE), alongside their Danish and American colleagues, have established that most of this thinning is due to the rise in surrounding ocean temperatures, which causes the glaciers’ floating extensions to melt. Until now, the glaciers in this region were (…)

Published on September 21, 2023
CNRS Press release

The CNRS Gold Medal, one of the most prestigious French scientific distinctions, has been awarded to the ecologist Sandra Lavorel. A specialist in the functioning of ecosystems, during her 30 years as a CNRS researcher she has revealed the contributions that biodiversity makes to human life, as well as the societal and economic impact of its alteration by environmental changes. She regularly contributes her expertise to public policy-making. The CNRS Gold Medal, along with a €50,000 prize (…)

Published on November 10, 2022

Researchers’ recent observations of a stellar-mass black hole called Cygnus X-1 reveal new details about the configuration of extremely hot matter in the region immediately surrounding the black hole. Matter is heated to millions of degrees as it is pulled toward a black hole. This hot matter glows in X-rays. Researchers are using measurements of the polarization of these X-rays to test and refine models that describe how black holes swallow matter, becoming some of the most luminous (…)

Published on August 24, 2022
Press release ETH Zurich

Researchers at ETH Zurich and Université Grenoble Alpes have reconstructed the extent of Switzerland’s 20th century glacier ice loss for the first time. For this purpose, the researchers used historical imagery and conclude that the country’s glaciers lost half their volume between 1931 and 2016.

Published on May 06, 2022
CNRS Press release

For the past thirty years, the star β Pictoris has fascinated astronomers because it enables them to observe a planetary system in the process of formation. It is made up of at least two young planets, and also contains comets, which were detected as early as 1987. These were the first comets ever observed around a star other than the Sun. Now, an international research team headed by Alain Lecavelier des Etangs, CNRS researcher at the Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris (CNRS/Sorbonne (…)

Published on April 15, 2022
Press release published by UGA

Atmospheric rivers landfalls shown to induce extreme conditions that destabilize Antarctic Peninsula ice shelves according to a new study from researchers (including IGE / OSUG ) from the Université Grenoble Alpes, CNRS, Sorbonne Université and Aix Marseille Université, and from Portugal, Belgium, Germany, and Norway. Their study will be published in the journal of Communications Earth & Environment on April 14, 2022.
80% of the total Antarctica ice output flow through ice shelves (…)

Published on March 11, 2022

Scientists have precisely dated the Hiawatha impact crater, the first known impact crater buried under the Greenland Ice Sheet to 58 million years old – just a few million years younger than the impact that killed off the dinosaurs. The work (involving scientists from IGE & IPAG) led by researchers at the Swedish Museum of Natural History, the Natural History Museum of Denmark, and the Globe Institute University of Copenhagen overturns previous suggestions that the impact may have (…)

Published on February 07, 2022

Many mountain populations—in the Andes or Himalayas, for example—rely on glaciers for their water. Yet changes in glacial water reserves, like predictions of sea level rise, greatly depend on glacier volume and thickness, both of which have been poorly evaluated—until now.
By analysing over 800,000 pairs of satellite images, researchers from the CNRS, Université Grenoble Alpes (France) and Dartmouth College (USA) have established the first global map of flow velocities for 98% (>200,000) (…)

Published on January 14, 2022
NRAO Press release

Scientists using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) made a rare detection of a likely stellar flyby event in the Z Canis Majoris (Z CMa) star system. An intruder—not bound to the system—object came in close proximity to and interacted with the environment surrounding the binary protostar, causing the formation of chaotic, stretched-out streams of dust and gas in the disk surrounding it.
While such intruder-based flyby (…)

Published on December 16, 2021
ESO Press release

The European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope Interferometer (ESO’s VLTI) has obtained the deepest and sharpest images to date of the region around the supermassive black hole at the centre of our galaxy. The new images zoom in 20 times more than what was possible before the VLTI and have helped astronomers find a never-before-seen star close to the black hole. By tracking the orbits of stars at the centre of our Milky Way, the team has made the most precise measurement yet of the (…)