The dropstone iceberg paper

Friends, this week has been a big one for my lab. Another paper reporting the results of my research has been published, and I am overjoyed. This most recent paper has been published in the highest-ranking scientific journal in the world, Nature. 

What it looked like stepping out of the helicopter on an 
iceberg laden with dropstones. Photo from 2021. 

The story begins in 2021 with the discovery of an iceberg in eastern Greenland carrying thousands of dark black rocks. Colleagues and I flew to the iceberg from R/V Polarstern with a helicopter to investigate. Our discovery inspired a whole series of analyses that have taken the last 5 years to complete. 

Along the way, we discovered that the iceberg was not unique. In fact, we found that there was a stark 5x increase in iceberg sightings in the Fram Strait beginning in 2000. Most of those icebergs originated in northeast Greenland or northern Russia, where glaciers have lost mass and calved off increasing numbers of icebergs over the last decades. 

The stones the iceberg was carrying originated on land - either via an avalanche that dumped rocks onto the top of a glacier, or by becoming frozen in the bottom of the glacier as it scraped across the ground. As the iceberg traveled south and slowly melted, those stones will end up on the seafloor. Long-term research from the HAUSGARTEN observatory showed that there has been an increase in the number of dropstones on the seafloor in recent years, accompanied by an increase in dropstone-associated fauna. Sponges, tube worms, and anemones attach to the rocks, and these species have found more habitats on the seafloor as the dropstones have rained down. 

Altogether, our study showed a chain of events all the way from glaciers to the deep seafloor. As the Arctic basin warms, glaciers calve off more icebergs, which drift out to sea and deposit stones on the deep seafloor. As the density of stones increases, there is more habitat available for deep-sea sponges, anemones, and tube worms. Climate change impacts every part of the Arctic basin, right down to the deep ocean floor. 

I am incredibly proud of my team's work. You can read our paper here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10630-4

Also check out the joint AWI-WHOI press release in English and German. 

News stories have already appeared in Nature's news section, AWI's Sea Ice Portal (this author retold our work as a crime story, and it's delightful) and on Focus+ (German news site).