But Robin Bell, a geophysicist at Columbia University's Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory, reports with colleagues in Nature Geoscience that they used ice - penetrating radar to identify ragged blocks of ice as tall as skyscrapers and as wide as the island of Manhattan at the very bottom of the ice sheet. (chimalaya.org)
The hope is that the cables could reveal secrets about what's happening underneath the ice sheets, especially about melting at the so - called grounding line, the place where the bottom of an ice sheet meets the slightly warmer ocean. (sciencemag.org)
«All of a sudden it allows us to understand how dynamic the bottom of the ice sheet was — or was not — over that long time period,» Schroeder says. (scientificamerican.com)