Sentences with phrase «ocean ice sheets»

Mercer (1969) considered breakup of an Arctic Ocean ice sheet; this is cited as a likely explanation by Ruddiman and McIntyre (1981a), pp. 204ff.

Not exact matches

The world's oceans are rapidly rising as waters warm and ice sheets melt.

Additionally, ice sheets are sometimes affected by increased ocean temperatures that literally undermine the ice sheets and melt them from below.

There are more, however, including the amount of sunlight an ice sheet is able to reflect; the larger an ice sheet, the more sunlight is reflected, but the smaller an ice sheet, the more ocean there is surrounding the ice sheet to absorb the sunlight which in turn heats up the surrounding waters increasing the melt which decreases the size of the ice sheet which in turn... and so goes the cycle.

Almost exactly a year ago, a 251 - square - kilometer sheet of ice broke from the Petermann Glacier in Greenland and started slowly drifting into the open ocean.

Following the maxim of keeping everything as simple as possible, but not simpler, Will Steffen from the Australian National University and I drew up an Anthropocene equation by homing in on the rate of change of Earth's life support system: the atmosphere, oceans, forests and wetlands, waterways and ice sheets and fabulous diversity of life.

The Earth's climate system is characterised by complex interactions between the atmosphere, oceans, ice sheets, landmasses and the biosphere (parts of the world with plant and animal life).

«The widespread loss of Antarctic ice shelves, driven by a warming ocean or warming atmosphere, could spell disaster for our coastlines — and there is sound geological evidence that supports what the models are telling us,» said Robert M. DeConto of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, a co-author of the study and one of the developers of the ice - sheet model used.

Willis is leading a new mission to study the effects of warming oceans on the melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet.

Any parts of the bed this low are easily exposed to ocean water, allowing the ice sheet to weaken from below as the ocean water warms.

That question is central to understanding the effects of ice sheet melting on ocean water properties, circulation, and biological systems, on scales from local to basinwide.

The deep grooves under the massive ice sheet could facilitate flow into the ocean, which suggests sea level rise estimates for this century need to be revised upwards

The precariously moored West Antarctic ice sheet probably won't collapse into the ocean all in one go as the climate warms.

The properties of the climate system include not just familiar concepts of averages of temperature, precipitation, and so on but also the state of the ocean and the cryosphere (sea ice, the great ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, glaciers, snow, frozen ground, and ice on lakes and rivers).

Today, ice sheets are melting, sea level is rising, oceans are warming, and weather events are becoming more extreme.

Scientists have suggested that ice sheets covering the ocean, or a hydrogen - sulfide haze, might have protected nascent life, but attempts to model these conditions have given ambiguous results.

In August 2015, University of Delaware oceanographer Andreas Muenchow and colleagues deployed the first UD ocean sensors underneath Petermann Glacier in North Greenland, which connects the great Greenland ice sheet directly with the ocean.

They found that western Antarctica has recently seen warmer, saltier water being driven under the shelf — the part of the ice sheet that sticks out over the ocean (Science, doi.org/xkx).

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.

The days were becoming rapidly shorter as winter approached, and I sat back and imagined the Arctic Ocean, just outside the clinic windows, under a sheet of ice in just a few months.

From 500 feet up everything appeared in miniature except the giant ice shelves — seemingly endless expanses of ice, as thick as the length of several football fields, that float in the Southern Ocean, fringing the ice sheets that virtually cover the Antarctic landmass.

The warming ocean and atmosphere that are already melting glaciers and ice sheets produce a catastrophic rise in the ocean.

The shelves act as a buttress to the «grounded» ice, helping slow the flow of the ice sheet's glaciers into the ocean.

Perhaps extra carbon dioxide from a period of heightened seafloor eruptions eventually percolates through the ocean and into the atmosphere, allowing warming that would deliver a coup de grâce to the massive ice sheets.

The Antarctic ice sheet, the thick layer of ice covering much of the continent, is anchored in place by its floating fringe, shelves of ice that jut out into the surrounding ocean.

This could have significant implications for Antarctica's ice shelves and ice sheets, with previous research showing that even small increases in ocean temperatures can substantially increase melt rates around the Peninsula.

«If the West Antarctic ice sheet were to disappear, sea level would rise almost 19 feet; the ice in the Greenland ice sheet could add 24 feet to that; and the East Antarctic ice sheet could add yet another 170 feet to the level of the world's oceans: more than 213 feet in all.»

These coastal glaciers hold back inland glaciers, so their collapse would set off a chain reaction ending with the West Antarctic Ice Sheet pouring into the Southern Ocean.

It's known that when ice sheets start to melt, cooling the air in that region, the winds over the Southern Ocean strengthen, Toggweiler says.

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.

Many of the glaciers that jut out into the ocean are thinning, but whether the ice sheet itself has remained stable and intact, even during warm interglacial periods, is a matter of considerable debate.

• In Antarctica, Greenland and other places where big ice sheets are surrounded by the ocean, sometimes big chunks of ice fall into the ocean after they have started to melt.

«Very old ice probably exists in small isolated patches at the base of the ice sheet that have not yet been identified, but in many places it has probably melted and flowed out into the ocean.»

The paper also describes an atmosphere - ocean modeling study of feedback loops caused by ice sheet melting under 2 °C conditions.

As the ice sheets melt, there will not only be more water in the oceans, but the positions of those hills and valleys will shift.

A new study says that climate - induced feedback loops could lead to a change in ocean stratification and the more rapid melting of ice sheets.

The ice sheet reflects energy into space, and as that bright reflective surface is lost, more heat is trapped in the ocean.

That might include draining away the water that lubricates the bottom of an ice sheet, speeding its progress to the sea, or installing barriers to prevent warming ocean waters from hitting the bottom of such glaciers and hastening meltdown.

«It could be in the form of an ice sheet, or an aquifer, or a piece of ocean.

«It's hard to discern an ice sheet's cycles on land because it destroys the evidence,» she says, «but it dumps that evidence in the oceans, archived in layers on the bottom.»

Analyzing and dating these rocks, they found that ocean water began to appear on the ridge's land - facing side in 1945, even as the ice sheet remained grounded on the ridge's summit, scientists report online today in Nature.

«We argue that it was the establishment of the modern deep ocean circulation — the ocean conveyor — about 2.7 million years ago, and not a major change in carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere that triggered an expansion of the ice sheets in the northern hemisphere,» says Stella Woodard, lead author and a post-doctoral researcher in the Department of Marine and Coastal Sciences.

Massive ice sheets grew across the Antarctic continent, major animal groups shifted, and ocean temperatures decreased by as much as 5 degrees.

If there's anything more complicated than the global forces of thermal expansion, ice sheet melt and ocean circulation that contribute to worldwide sea - level rise, it might be the forces of real estate speculation and the race - based historical housing patterns that color present - day gentrification in Miami.

Enkelmann appreciates the challenge of collecting samples here because this range has the highest peaks of any coastal mountain range and is only 20 kilometers from the Pacific Ocean, but she points out that it is a tough area to study because of the big ice sheets.

«The strong impact of ocean onto Antarctic ice sheet dynamics, or the knowledge that we have about it, is reinforced by our study,» said lead study author Hannes Konrad of the University of Leeds in an interview with E&E News.

Massive reorganizations of the ocean - atmosphere system, the authors argue, are the key events that link cyclic changes in the earth's orbit to the advance and retreat of ice sheets

The study fuels a growing concern among scientists about the factors affecting the Antarctic ice sheet — namely, that warm ocean waters are helping to melt glaciers and drive greater levels of ice loss, particularly in West Antarctica.

Antarctica's great ice sheet is losing ground as it is eroded by warm ocean water circulating beneath its floating edge, a new study has found.

But because the surrounding ocean would have been warmer, and stabilizing sea ice less abundant, the massive East Antarctic ice sheet may have contributed to higher sea levels by flowing more quickly towards the ocean.