Sentences with phrase «beneath warmer ocean water»

Form as cold, dense water of the polar regions sinks and flows beneath warmer ocean water.

When cold, dense water of the polar regions sinks and flows beneath warmer ocean water.

Not exact matches

If you decouple that ice from where it's grounded — something that currents of warming water, already circulating around the Antarctic coast, could do — then water could flow beneath the inland ice and lubricate its slide into the ocean.

In a recent paper published in Nature Geoscience, his team identified two deep underwater cavities beneath the glacier that they note could be pathways for relatively warm ocean water to reach the underside of the glacier, enhancing its melting.

But scientists increasingly attribute much of the observed grounding line retreat — particularly in West Antarctica — to the influence of warmer ocean water seeping beneath the ice shelves and lapping against the bases of glaciers, melting the ice from the bottom up.

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.

Schimdt has found evidence that warm ocean currents and convective forces beneath Europa's frozen shell can cause large blocks of ice to overturn and melt, bringing vast pockets of water, sometimes holding as much liquid as all of the Great Lakes combined, to within several kilometers of the moon's icy surface.

Beneath an ice layer about 10 to 15 miles (15 - 25 kilometers) thick, the moon is thought to harbor a liquid water ocean, possibly warmed by geologic processes originating in the planet's core.

If the water remained in the channel, the water would eventually cool to a point where it was not melting much ice, but the channels allow the water to flow out to the open ocean and warmer water to flow in, again melting the ice shelf from beneath.

They reason that with warmer temperatures, there was more water available to act as a lubricant beneath the glaciers, easing their inexorable slide to the ocean.

Over most of the oceans, surface water is warmer, and so less dense, than the water beneath it.

Warm ocean water plays a significant role in melting glacial ice from below, and a better mapping of Antarctica's and Greenland's landforms beneath the ice suggests that ocean melting of the glacier fronts may play a more significant role than previously thought as the ice sheets retreat (under a global warming scenario).

The authors postulated that this warm salty water (WSW) layer, situated beneath the colder surface freshwater in the North Atlantic, generated ocean convective available potential energy (OCAPE) over decades at the end of HS1.

But Mrs. Thompson, who has been there many times, said advancements in underwater photography have shown the continent's huge west shelf is melting from beneath from warmer ocean water, as well as from warmer air above.

They found that rising air temperatures above the southeastern Weddell Sea will thin the ice there, and warm ocean water will increasingly encroach beneath the Filchner - Ronne Ice Shelf.

Scientists see in present - day West Antarctica that warmer ocean water can also reach beyond ice shelves and infiltrate beneath inland glacial ice.

But scientists increasingly attribute much of the observed grounding line retreat — particularly in West Antarctica — to the influence of warmer ocean water seeping beneath the ice shelves and lapping against the bases of glaciers, melting the ice from the bottom up.

As however it takes longer than before for the sea ice to recover and extend across most of the Arctic Ocean, the lower atmosphere is being warmed by the (partly) open water beneath it — like a take away coffee without a lid emits heat to the air above it.

Ice melts when the ocean water beneath it warms sufficiently.

The researchers focused on the Pine Island Glacier in Antarctica, which has been thinning at an increasingly rapid pace for about the past 20 years, as the waters beneath get warmer along with the rest of the ocean.

Moreover, the warm «Blob» in the North Pacific essentially disappears in model forecasts later this winter, likely a product of numerous storm systems bringing vigorous vertical mixing of the ocean and drawing up cooler water from beneath.

Warm deep ocean water has penetrated beneath it, causing an astounding rate of retreat.

The oceans beneath delay the warming of the surface waters due to thermal inertia.

Ice sheets resting on retrograde beds are inherently unstable, because once the grounding lines reach the edge of the «bowl», they will eventually retreat all the way to the bottom of the «bowl» even if the ocean water intruding beneath the ice doesn't get any warmer.

The Pine Island glacier is grounded on continental bedrock below sea level, which means that warming ocean water could penetrate far inland beneath the shelf, without anyone being conscious of any change.

Since most people understand that hurricanes are fueled by warm ocean water, however, perhaps it would be conceptually simpler to focus on the seawater beneath Harvey.