Half a century of ice loss: the new IMBIE dataset

More publication news! This month I’ve actually had 3 co-authored publications come out and hot on the heels of the mélange paper, a rather different piece of work I’ve contributed to has just come out: the latest assessment from the Ice Sheet Mass Balance Inter-comparison Exercise known as IMBIE to its friends, has just been published in Scientific Data. The paper is open access here: Otosaka et al., 2026. It’s the third (at least) in a series of articles monitoring the health of the ice sheets. Figure 2 from the IMBIE paper is the money shot, as it were. The changes in ice sheet mass budget since the 1970s… This one is a bit different from my usual, as it’s a data paper — the whole point is the dataset itself, which is freely available for anyone to download and use. But the numbers in it are rather striking and here is already a bit of misinformation spreading, so I thought it worth a short post. What is IMBIE? For readers who haven’t come across it before: IMBIE is a big…

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