Sentences with phrase «as glaciers flow»

The data revealed that as glaciers flow faster, they stretch out and thin, which reduces their weight and lifts them farther off the bedrock.

Not exact matches

Howat and his team were able to figure this out by creating high - resolution topographic models of the glaciers and their boundaries, as well as a numerical model of exactly how much water was flowing off these coastal glaciers and ice caps — technology that wasn't available back in 1996.

Wahlenbergbreen glacier in Svalbard, Norway, is seen in September 2013, as its flow began speeding up.

Most surges, broadly defined as a flow at least 10 and often hundreds of times faster than a glacier's usual pace of advance, are quieter affairs.

The broad, bright plains known as Sputnik Planum seem to be covered by nitrogen glaciers; these flow gloppily, and quickly erase craters made by crashing asteroids.

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

As an example, Howat pointed to the portion of the mosaic showing Jakobshavn Glacier, the fastest - flowing glacier in the Greenland Ice Sheet.

Today, as warming waters caused by climate change flow underneath the floating ice shelves in Pine Island Bay, the Antarctic Ice Sheet is once again at risk of losing mass from rapidly retreating glaciers.

But now, a vulnerable glacier on the other side of the island, part of a massive flow of ice known as the Northeast Greenland Ice Stream, shows that yet another region of Greenland is feeling the effects of warming oceans.

At the grounding line, the ice detaches from the bedrock and juts out into the water as a kind of floating ledge, or ice shelf, which helps to stabilize the glacier and hold back the flow of ice behind it.

Nonetheless, Khazendar and his colleagues say that two of the glaciers flowing into Larsen C have already begun to accelerate as the ice shelf has weakened.

Glaciers around the world are melting and contributing to sea level rise, but scientists still don't quite understand how exactly glaciers give birth to icebergs as they flow into the ocean and lGlaciers around the world are melting and contributing to sea level rise, but scientists still don't quite understand how exactly glaciers give birth to icebergs as they flow into the ocean and lglaciers give birth to icebergs as they flow into the ocean and lose ice.

All told, if the eastern and western Antarctic ice shelves were to melt completely, they would raise sea levels by as much as 230 feet (70 meters); the collapse of smaller shelves like Larsen B has sped up the flow of glaciers behind them into the sea, contributing to the creeping up of high tide levels around the world.

These two glaciers have been described as the «weak underbelly» of the ice sheet because surges in the ice flow there could theoretically cause the rapid disintegration of the entire West Antarctic ice sheet.

The ordinary meter - or - two - a-year speed of the glacier's flow increased roughly tenfold as it passed over the lakes.

CLIMATE CALAMITIES As ice shelves on the Southern Antarctic Peninsula weaken, glaciers flow faster into the sea.

But an ice shelf is thought to act as a «cork in the bottle,» damming the flow of the land - based glacier that slowly feeds the shelf in the sea.

As a result, the ice shelf is likely to both thin and flow faster, the researchers note — and eventually, that could allow the glacier to slide into the sea.

«As the glacier's calving front retreats into deeper regions, it loses ice — the ice in front that is holding back the flow — causing it to speed up,» Joughin clarifies.

On the glacier scale, thinning is strongest in the Amundsen Sea embayment (ASE), where it is confirmed as being localized on the fast - flowing glaciers and their tributaries (Fig. 3 [below].

Co-author Dr Ivan Haigh, lecturer in coastal oceanography at the University of Southampton and also based at NOCS, adds: «Historical observations show a rising sea level from about 1800 as sea water warmed up and melt water from glaciers and ice fields flowed into the oceans.

On the other hand, if the ice shell is sufficiently thick, the less intense interior heat can be transferred to warmer ice at the bottom of the shell, with additional heat generated by tidal flexing of the warmer ice which can slowly rise and flow as do glaciers do on Earth; this slow but steady motion may also disrupt the extremely cold, brittle ice at the surface to produce the chaos regions.

However, if as a consequence of shortening, the glaciers are also flowing faster, then we would be seeing another (small) contribution to sea level rise.

A study published in February also documented changes in the glacier's flow rate, indicating that little - studied ice shelves are starting to get more attention as scientists» understanding of ice and satellite coverage improves.

As higher sea levels lifting the glacier, then the tides would constantly flex the ice tongues breaking and releasing the ice opening up the ice flow «cork in the bottle».

I suppose that as the under side of the glacier melts, the resulting fresh water mixes with the adjacent salt water, making it lighter and causing it to flow upwards along the under side of the ice.

Pine Island Glacier, the longest and fastest flowing glacier in Antarctica, has calved multiple icebergs, as can be seen in a series of photos.

REVIEW: Water Science for Schools examines a wealth of water topics such as water properties, how much water is there on earth and where, how water quality and stream flow are measured, the water and water - use cycles, national maps showing how water is used by state, surface and ground water, pesticides in ground water, aquifers, and glaciers and icecaps.

Whales would surface beside our kayaks, leopard seals would ignore us as we floated by their ice flows, penguins would peck at our legs when we explored the sea shore and the icebergs and glaciers were huge.

As higher sea levels lifting the glacier, then the tides would constantly flex the ice tongues breaking and releasing the ice opening up the ice flow «cork in the bottle».

Dr. Rignot recently proposed that unabated warming could result in three feet of global sea rise just from water flowing off Greenland, three feet from Antarctica and 18 inches as the remaining alpine glaciers shrivel away.

Outflow from the ice - dammed lake is estimated to have been 11.3 million cubic meters; the additional 17.5 million cubic meters is due to frictional melting of ice as the flood traveled in contact with the glacier, together with an input from base flow.»

Their observations were that the region of lightly grounded ice at the glacier terminus is extending upstream, and the changes inland are consistent with the effects of a prolonged disturbance to the ice flow, such as the effects of ocean - driven melting.

As they emphasize, this applies only in those locations where there are volcanoes, which is certainly not everywhere where fast glacier flow and thinning is occurring.

However, as Timothy explained in # 121, in addition to the direct sea level rise that occurs when ice shelves melt, there is a much larger secondary effect, in that ice shelves act as a brake, greatly reducing the rate of flow of the glaciers behind them from the land to the sea; and when ice shelves melt, the rate of glacier flow increases quite rapidly.

As summer neared an end in 2007, reports from Greenland indicated that the flow of glaciers into the sea had accelerated beyond anything glaciologists had thought possible.

A full explanation will require numerical modeling of glacier flow, but observations to date suggest that ice shelves act as «braking» systems on the glaciers behind them.

Advances in glacier ice flow mapping using repeat satellite images, and later using interferometric synthetic aperture radar SAR methods, facilitated the mass budget approach, although this still requires an estimate of snow input and a cross-section of the glacier as it flows out from the continent and becomes floating ice.

In addition to a groundwater base flow driving the current steady rise in sea level, meltwater from retreating Little Ice Age glaciers undoubtedly contributed as well.

Once the growth of Little Ice Age glaciers stopped, and groundwater base flow was no longer offset, we would expect sea levels to rise as witnessed during the 19th and 20th centuries.

There is a potential difference between the two, in glacier such as most marine terminating outlet glaciers, where the glacier flow is rapid, acceleration results from retreat and thinning.

In fact in a dry year such as 1998 glaciers yielded 28 billion gallons of runoff to Baker Lake, while other sources were below average, which amounted to 45 % of the total basin flow.

In fact in a dry year such as 1998 glaciers yielded 110 million m3 of runoff to Baker Lake, while other sources were below average, which amounted to 45 % of the total basin flow (Pelto, 2008).

Yet as glaciers disappear, dry season river flow declines.

Usually, surface melt and ice flow (as glaciers calve into the sea) are the two ways in which Greenland (and other places, like Canada) contribute water to the ocean.

An instrument called a Vertical Microstructure Profiler — a kind of giant toilet brush that measures subtle fluctuations in the water — detected turbulence amid meltwater as it flowed out of a cave beneath the Pine Island Glacier, one of Antarctica's fastest melting glaciers.

Like the rhythm of retreating and advancing glaciers, rates of sea level rise have ebbed and flowed as seen in this graph from the IPCC.

«We all have very nasty fears that the flows of the Indus could be severely, severely affected by glacier melt as a consequence of climate change.

As these glaciers retreat due to global warming (see Chapter 1), river flows are increased in the short term, but the contribution of glacier melt will gradually decrease over the next few decades.

These impressive ice cracks dropping hundreds of metres one day can be gone the next as they fluctuate with a glacier's flow.