Uncertainty, Experiences, and Focus

1. A New Year

As 2026 began, it was the middle of winter in much of the northern hemisphere. A cold snap across much of Europe was accompanied by heavy snowfall [1], even forcing several football games to be postponed, including one due to snow load concerns at a stadium [2]. The upper Midwest [3] and northeastern United States [4], in addition to many parts of Canada [5], were colder than normal, and saw consistent snowfall since late November. Meanwhile, across the western United States, the winter started slowly, with the snowpack being much less than 50% of the normal levels well into December [6]. My local mountain snowpack is forlorn, and is heading towards being the lowest on record [6]—I am exasperated as I wax my skis but cannot use them. Along the west coast of the US, warm temperatures were accompanied by atmospheric rivers that brought large amounts of rain, causing flooding [7].

Winter 2026 has ushered in another weird year. However, while this new year has brought more uncertainty [8], this creates opportunities. We need to better define this uncertainty, which will allow us to explore both the past and the present. That will allow us to more realistically imagine, and consequently plan for, the future. Most of us learn through experience: spending time outdoors facilitates our learning and teaching, and also keeps us healthy [9]. A virtual environment is a surrogate for in-person learning [10], but I recommend going outside to learn and contemplate [11].

2. Journal Focus and Special Issues

Academics exist in an environment where we need to publish our research [12], and our work needs to be cited [13]. The journal Glacies (ISSN 2813-8740) provides a go-to venue for ice and snow scholarship [11], and focuses on “any investigation of ice and snow that includes monitoring, measurement, modelling, and remote sensing of snow and/or ice in any location, plus any educational activity related to, and the human impact of and on, ice and snow”. While these topics are broad, they all relate to water in the solid phase; therefore, the journal is an excellent compendium for all things ice and snow.

A journal Special Issue focuses on a more specific topic [14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22], and can be associated with a conference, with papers usually submitted and published afterwards—they often prove successful. An example is the two double Special Issues that resulted from the 1998 International Snow Hydrology Conference, with 3 keynote papers and 48 regular papers [23]. I attended that conference, and those Special Issues were a go-to resource back in the hard-copy days; they are still on a bookshelf in my office today. An analysis of papers that influenced the thinking of nine snow scientists found that papers from Special Issues tended to be remembered more often than others [24].

There are currently two Special Issues open for submissions in Glacies, which are available at https://www.mdpi.com/journal/glacies: (1) “Advances in River Ice Research” (edited by the Editorial Board Member Prof. Dr. Hung Tao Shen) and (2) “Current Snow Science Research 2025–2026” (edited by the Editor-in-Chief Prof. Dr. Steven R. Fassnacht, Dr. Fraser King, and Dr. Krystopher Chutko). The latter is running in parallel with several conferences, including the joint Eastern and Western Snow Conference, the International Association of Cryospheric Sciences biennial meeting, and the 5th International Conference on Snow Hydrology 2026. I encourage you to consider contributing to these Special Issues, and also editing your own Special Issue.

Two volumes and six issues have been published to date in Glacies, with 25 papers covering a variety of topics and disciplines. I invite the readers of this editorial to explore the scope of the journal https://www.mdpi.com/journal/glacies/about, and to feel free to propose other topics and Special Issues https://www.mdpi.com/journal/glacies/special_issues. I thank the readers, authors, reviewers, Editorial Board Members, and members of the Glacies editorial team for working to increase our understanding of ice and snow. We look forward to your further cooperation, and the participation from new authors whose scholarship [11] relates to Glacies.