Throwback Thursday – Cover of Gravel-bed Rivers V book

Throwback 24 years to a visualisation of the Waimakariri River, produced as part of my PhD research, that was used as the cover image (front and back) for the New Zealand Hydrological Society’s ‘Gravel-Bed Rivers V’ book, edited by M. Paul Mosley. This book contains the Proceedings of the 5th International Gravel-Bed Rivers Workshop, held at Christchurch and Franz Josef Glacier, New Zealand, from 29 August to 2 September 2000, and reflected international progress in the broad field of gravel-bed rivers between 1995 and 2000. I recently rediscovered it whilst sorting through boxes in the garage….

Rainbow colour maps remain widely used in the geosciences

Proportion of papers surveyed with and without colour issues. Journals considered were Earth System Dynamics (ESD), Geophysical Research Letters (GRL), Ocean Science (OS), Solid Earth (SE) and The Cryosphere (TC) for the years 2005, 2010, 2015 and 2020. Results obtained by Stoelzle and Stein (2021) for Hydrology and Earth System Sciences (HESS) are also included. Source: Westaway (2022)

Relative contribution of different sources to total global sea level rise 1992 to 2016

Percentages show contribution from each source for each 5-year period, calculated based on the total positive contribution to sea level rise during that period. Land ice contributions are taken from Bamber et al. (2018). Steric contributions use the Total Steric Level Anomaly (TSSLA) 0-2000m given by NOAA’s World Ocean Atlas 2009 (WOA09). Chart: Richard Westaway.

Ice sheet contributions to sea level rise in 2100 based on the results of structured expert judgement


Individual ice sheet contributions to sea level rise for 2100 (a) low and (b) high temperature scenarios for East Antarctica (EAIS), West Antarctica (WAIS) and Greenland (GrIS). The plots were generated from 50,000 realizations of the relevant probability distributions based on the outcomes of Structured Expert Judgement, a process by which individual experts’ views are combined and weighted in a statistically robust manner. Horizontal bars indicate the 5th, 50th, and 95th percentile values. Also shown is the likely range (17th and 83rd percentiles) as used in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) plus (in grey) the total Antarctic ice sheet contribution. Chart: Richard Westaway Source: Bamber et al (2019)

New global GPS data set for investigating GIA

Land ice contribution to global sea level rise 1992-2016

Contribution of ice sheets to total land ice loss 1992-2016

Land ice mass trend estimates published since 2013