SIRG – Snow and Ice Research Group New Zealand

It was fantastic to welcome the international cryosphere community to Wellington in early February for the Climate and Cryosphere Conference 2026, supported by the World Climate Research Programme Climate and Cryosphere Project (CliC) and Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research’s INSTANT research programme. The meeting brought together around 500 researchers, practitioners, and stakeholders from across the world to share the latest science and perspectives on the rapidly changing cryosphere.

There’s a small smudge of supraglacial debris on Haupapa Tasman Glacier, positioned just above the upper limit of the continuous debris cover. At first glance, it looks like it might have fallen from a large landslide or perhaps broken off the lateral moraine. Curious, I traced it back in time using Google Earth’s (GE) historical imagery.

Patchy Snow Cover on Debris-Covered Glaciers: a poster presented at the Climate and Cryosphere (CliC) Conference 8-12 February 2026, Pōneke, Aotearoa 0 Discover more from SIRG - Snow and Ice Research Group New Zealand Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.

This website keeps Aotearoa’s snow and ice research community connected. Following chat at the SIRG 2025 meeting about sharing resources, the website is now envisaged as a community hub for us all to contribute to. All SIRG members are warmly invited to create blog posts and help keep the site up to date. You can now also subscribe to an email digest to receive notifications when new content is posted.

Anyone who spends time near New Zealand’s glaciers will have pondered how snow avalanching affects our glaciers. It turns out, the answer is more than anywhere else in the world. Marin Kneib from ETH in Zurich, Switzerland and colleagues have recently found avalanches contribute 15 % of the snow accumulation to New Zealand’s glaciers. This was the highest contribution for any glacier region of the world. Most global climate change projections of glaciers ignore avalanche effects.

Konstantinos Michailos from the Australian National University and co-authors have found that clusters of earthquakes occur near to the Fox Glacier/Te Moeka o Tuawe, Franz Josef Glacier/Ka Roimata o Hine Hukatere, Tasman Glacier/Haupapa and Murchison Glacier/Te Hiwai. What is more, the shallow earthquakes at these locations have seasonal cycles, generally peaking in winter, summer, or both.

In a recent calculation of how much ice has been lost from the world’s glaciers, New Zealand’s lack of measurements proved problematic for the researchers. Inés Dussaillant (from the University of Zurich) and colleagues combined manual glacier measurements with satellite glacier elevation data to derive annual changes in glacier mass for each of the glacier regions of the world since 1976.

We had a wonderful joint SIRG and SIS (sea ice symposium) meeting at the Lyall Bay Surf Lifesaving Club in Wellington from 10 – 12 Feb, with just over 40 attendees (group photo to come).

The United Nations declared 2025 as the International Year of Glaciers’ Preservation. It was launched on 21st January. Dr Heather Purdie of the University of Canterbury in collaboration with Dr Brian Anderson of the Victoria University of Wellington provided the first Side Event where they summarised the glacier monitoring efforts occurring in New Zealand. This was followed by a creative “weather report” of the Haupapa/Tasman Glacier.

NIWA Lauder Atmospheric Research Station Where: Lauder, Central Otago. Workshop sessions will be held in the Becks Hall (7 min drive from NIWA Lauder) with accommodation available at NIWA Lauder and Becks Hall (camping only). When: 14 – 16 February 2024. Presentation sessions will run over the afternoon of Wednesday 14 February and all-day Thursday 15 February. A field trip on Friday 16 February will conclude the workshop. Who: SIRG 2024 is open to all researchers with an interest in snow and ice.