Sentences with phrase «huge sheets of ice»

Huge sheets of ice (glaciers) cover large parts of the Earth's surface.

Not exact matches

The icebergs that find their way into the paths of transatlantic liners come down from the coast of Greenland; for the interior of Greenland is a huge ice sheet fringed by mountains and promontories.

As the volcano vented lava beneath the thick ice sheets, it released huge quantities of liquid water within the glacier.

Using the latter (plus a huge rise in the height of the ice sheet), Zwally's study finds that East Antarctica has gained roughly 147 billion metric tons a year.

The Arctic took another 3,000 - 4,000 years to warm this much, primarily because of the fact that the Northern Hemisphere had huge ice sheets to buffer warming, and the fact that changes in ocean currents and Earth's orbital configuration accelerated warming in the south.

«This new, huge data volume records how the ice sheet evolved and how it's flowing today,» said Joe MacGregor, the study's lead author, a glaciologist at The University of Texas at Austin Institute for Geophysics (UTIG), a unit of the Jackson School of Geosciences.

With light sensors sunk kilometers deep into the ice sheet, IceCube's detector is so huge that it could pick up traces of a million neutrinos from a Milky Way supernova.

Not only is Greenland's melting ice sheet adding huge amounts of water to the oceans, it could also be unleashing 400,000 metric tons of phosphorus every year — as much as the mighty Mississippi River releases into the Gulf of Mexico, according to a new study.

What is new, experts said, is the idea that water at the ice sheet's base refreezes in huge amounts that can reshape the surface of the ice sheet.

Radar measurements of the height of the ice over parts of the continent suggest that the huge East Antarctic ice sheet grew slightly between 1992 and 2003.

During the last ice age, much of North America was covered by a giant ice sheet that many scientists believe underwent several catastrophic collapses, causing huge icebergs to enter the North Atlantic — phenomena known as Heinrich events.

The beginning of the last glacial period was characterized in the Northern hemisphere by significant accumulation of snow at high latitudes and the formation of a huge polar ice sheet.

The concept is relatively simple: A huge portion of the West Antarctic ice sheet sits on bedrock below sea - level that slopes even deeper further inland from the shore.

«I confess I do have the nightmare sometimes of one of these huge ice sheets, having gotten floated,...»

In this case, Marco Tedesco, director of the Cryospheric Processes and Remote Sensing Laboratory at City College of New York, is preparing to use a customized bait boat equipped with cameras, sonar and other systems to survey the huge blue lakes of meltwater forming each summer high on the ice sheet there.

We have fairly high confidence that we observe the history of Heinrich events (huge discharges of ice - rafted debris from the Laurentide ice sheet through Hudson Bay that are roughly coincident with large southern warming, southward shift of the intertropical convergence zone, extensive sea ice in the north Atlantic, reduced monsoonal rainfall in at least some parts of Asia, and other changes), and also cold phases of the Dansgaard / Oeschger oscillations that lack Heinrich layers and are characterized by muted versions of the other climate anomalies I just mentioned.

On the Antarctic Peninsula and in West Antarctica, warming waters are eroding the floating ice shelves that scientists say have impeded the seaward flow of the huge ice sheets of the interior.

Thus, whatever the contribution of mass loss from the Greenland ice sheet to the huge (4 - 8 m) rise in sea level of the Eemian, it occurred under very strong temperature forcing.

The discovery is significant in relation to the mechanism for rapid movement of the ice streams, which are huge, fast - flowing ice currents within the slow - moving ice sheet that covers most of Antarctica.

A few degrees of global warming has a huge impact on ice sheets, sea levels and other aspects of climate.

This means that the CO2 levels often associated with a 2 ˚C rise — 450ppm — may just be the tipping point for the total loss of all ice sheets on the planet and a huge sea - level rise.

The ice sheet is the focus of scientific research because its fate has huge implications for global sea levels, which are already rising as ice sheets melt and the ocean warms, exposing coastal locations to greater damage from storm surge - related flooding.

The new study, accordingly, uses a computer model of Antarctica to study the consequences of adding huge volumes of salt water to different portions of the ice sheet.

Researchers believe the Gamburtsev Subglacial Mountains, which are underneath the huge East Antarctic Ice Sheet, may have been created after a series of dramatic tectonic events.

The new results indicate that the similar and seemingly unstoppable melting of huge swaths of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) today by relatively warm ocean waters has precedent in an earlier era, members of the research team and other scientists said.

These authors postulated an extended Barents Sea Ice Sheet, the western part of the huge Eurasian Ice Sheet51, 55, that had reached the shelf edge causing polynya - like open - water conditions (triggered by strong katabatic winds) with phytoplankton and sea ice algae production, subglacial meltwater outflow and the deposition of suspended material on the slope at site PS2138 -Ice Sheet, the western part of the huge Eurasian Ice Sheet51, 55, that had reached the shelf edge causing polynya - like open - water conditions (triggered by strong katabatic winds) with phytoplankton and sea ice algae production, subglacial meltwater outflow and the deposition of suspended material on the slope at site PS2138 -Ice Sheet51, 55, that had reached the shelf edge causing polynya - like open - water conditions (triggered by strong katabatic winds) with phytoplankton and sea ice algae production, subglacial meltwater outflow and the deposition of suspended material on the slope at site PS2138 -ice algae production, subglacial meltwater outflow and the deposition of suspended material on the slope at site PS2138 - 2.

CO2 will be anomalous near sources and terestrial sinks but this is not a concern in the middle of a huge ice sheet, unless there was an active volcanic vent nearby.

That the last little bit of ice in the arctic is melting, an ice sheet that once covered huge swaths of North America as far south as the US Rockies, upper Midwest and all of New England, is hardly proof that humans are changing the climate.

Ocean heat content is one of the most inert components of the climate system, second only to the huge ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica (hopefully at least — if the latter are not more unstable than we think).»

(57a) This was a good start, but it was only one of several ideas about how a huge ice sheet might become unstable.

But that doesn't mean the melting of Greenland's massive ice sheet isn't a huge problem.

An ice sheet teetering on the edge of melting away is going to have a huge response because just a little extra energy changes the albedo.

The scientists used satellite monitoring to determine the contribution of all land - based ice (except for Greenland and Antarctica's huge ice sheets) to rising sea levels and found that the volume of ice melting into the sea each year from ice caps and glaciers was 100 cubic miles (or 417 cubic km).

In Congressional testimony he mentions «the huge potential costs if the impacts turn out to be even greater than predicted, something that appears to be the case now with the potential rapid collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and the increased sea level rise that will come with it.»

This happened as the world was coming out of the last ice age, in an event known as the Younger Dryas: a huge ice sheet over North America suddenly gave way, drained into the North Atlantic, and shut down the AMOC.

To leap from that to the claimed 3 - 7ºC warming requires that the changes in the ice sheets and vegetation arising from the current and (medium term) committed warming would increase the radiative imbalance by another ~ 2 W / m2 — and that is extreme (for reference, the changes between the last ice age and now from these factors is only about 4 W / m2 (Kohler et al, 2010) with the huge impact of the N. American and European ice sheets included).

Scientists who have examined the role of the bedrock on which the Greenland ice sheet rests think it shows the huge island is more vulnerable than realised to global warming.

And the calving of huge icebergs fuels researchers» fear that, within 100 years, the entire West Antarctic ice sheet could collapse, with disastrous consequences for many coastal cities worldwide.

The melting characteristics of such a huge ice sheet — spanning 656,000 square miles (1.7 million square kilometers)-- is important for various reasons, particularly its potential effect on sea levels.