Sentences with phrase «biggest ice sheets in»

Antarctica in the south and Greenland in the north have the oldest and biggest ice sheets in the world.

Not exact matches

Even relatively large calving events, where tabular ice chunks the size of Manhattan or bigger calve from the seaward front of the shelf, can be considered normal if the ice sheet is in overall balance.

These big ice sheets have frozen and melted many times in the past (producing ice ages with low sea levels and warm periods with high sea levels).

• 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.

The biggest changes were seen in West Antarctica, where more than a fifth of the ice sheet has retreated across the sea floor faster than the pace of deglaciation.

In Greenland this doesn't happen much because the water drains away through big channels like the mega-canyon, so melting ice sheets there tend not to drive rapid sea level rises.

One of the big mysteries in the scientific world is how the ice sheets of Antarctica formed so rapidly about 34 million years ago, at the boundary between the Eocene and Oligocene epochs.

When the planet's big ice sheets collapsed at the end of the last ice age, their melting caused global sea levels to rise as much as 100 meters in roughly 10,000 years, which is fast in geological time, Mann noted.

The world's biggest reserves of above - water ice are in Antarctica, and understanding the rate at which the ice sheet will slough into the sea could help researchers refine sea level rise forecasts.

In this model of Titan, however, the roots extending below the ice sheet are so much bigger than the bumps on the surface that their buoyancy is pushing them up against the ice sheet.

«It's like a big beach ball under the ice sheet pushing up on it, and the only way to keep it submerged is if the ice sheet is strong,» said Hemingway, a doctoral candidate in planetary geophysics at UCSC and lead author of the paper.

The ice that is of most concern is the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which is undergoing unprecedented changes, and is likely the biggest potential player in future global sea level riice that is of most concern is the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which is undergoing unprecedented changes, and is likely the biggest potential player in future global sea level riIce Sheet, which is undergoing unprecedented changes, and is likely the biggest potential player in future global sea level rise.

But the IPCC specifically excluded the mechanism able to produce the biggest amounts of water quickly - acceleration in the flow of ice from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, the world's two major ice masses that would between them raise sea levels by about 70m if they completely melted.

Changes in the Antarctic Ice Sheet have a big influence on global climate and sea level.

Amelia Shevenell from the University of South Florida specializes in big ideas about paleoceanography and the Antarctic Ice Sheet.

That's simply because in climate history, warm climate means small ice sheets, cold climate comes with big ice sheets, and sea level has changed accordingly.

That's simply because in climate history, warm climate means small ice sheets, cold climate comes with big ice sheets, and sea level has changed accordingly.

For weather predictions, accuracy disappears within a few weeks — but for ocean forecasts, accuracy seems to have decadal scale accuracy — and when you go to climate forcing effects, the timescale moves toward centuries, with the big uncertainties being ice sheet dynamics, changes in ocean circulation and the biosphere response.

Ian Joughin made some statements recently [context] that I thought were pretty solid about it being a few centuries before this kind of very rapid sea level rise can take place and that makes sense to me because there are some very important things that you have to do in order to turn on the rapid response of the Antarctic ice sheet — you have to get rid of a couple of big ice shelves for starters.

In particular, Andy straightforwardly writes: «accumulating greenhouse gases will warm the world, erode ice sheets, raise seas and have big impacts on biology and human affairs.»

The biggest change is that ice sheet dynamics look more uncertain now than at the time of the TAR, which is why this uncertainty is not included any more in the cited range but discussed separately in the text.

A big new Nature paper summarizing findings from one of the most important drilling projects on Greenland has important implications for the fate of the ice sheet in a warmer world.

«We found that several vulnerable elements in Earth's climate system — like the Amazon and other big rain forests, like the great ice sheets that have so much sea level locked up in their ice — could be pushed toward abrupt or irreversible change if we go on toward 2100 with our business - as - usual increase in emissions of greenhouse gases,» he said.

But how the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets respond to warmer temperatures is the biggest unknown by far in trying to predict how fast the waters will rise over the coming century and beyond.

On the other hand, if by some chance and what ends up happening is totally independent of human activity, because it turns out after all that CO2 from fossil fuels is magically transparent to infrared and has no effect on ocean pH, unlike regular CO2, say, but coincidentally big pieces of the ice sheets melt and temperature goes up 7 C in the next couple of centuries and weather patterns change and large unprecedented extreme events happen with incerasing frequency, and coincidentally all the reefs and shellfish die and the ocean becomes a rancid puddle, that could be unfortunate.

«In terms of public debate, the big - ticket questions have been, «What is the history of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet?»»

From KU Leuven and the «department of annoying back - radiation» comes this claim that flies in the face of the «big melt» under «thin clouds» aka nearly clear skies back in July 2012 Clouds play a bigger role in the melting of the Greenland ice sheet than was previously assumed.

The biggest scientific contribution that Hansen and his colleagues make is an attempt to nail down a Moore's law (which models nonlinear rates of growth in computer chips) to ice sheets: Assuming non-linear processes have already begun, how fast will Greenland and Antarctica melt?

Not only did Greenland Ice Sheet surface melt in 2012 occur over a bigger - than - average area, it also began about two weeks earlier at lower elevations and, for any given elevation, lasted longer.

«The big question,» says Nick Golledge, senior research fellow at the Antarctic Research Centre at Victoria University in New Zealand, «is whether the ice sheet will react to these changing ocean conditions as rapidly as it did 14,000 years ago.»

«If climate change is an elaborate hoax, then the ice sheets must be in on it; the sea level must be in on it; and the polar bears are likely in on it, although they are big losers.»

The biggest problem seems to be for ice sheet melt, in the discrepancy between the paleoevidence and the models, with models producing rates of melting far below both the paleoevidence and current observations.

The impact of the melting of the great ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica is the biggest unknown in projections of future sea - level rise.

But we show that it is the glaciers and ice caps, not the two large ice sheets, that will be the big players in the sea rise for at least the next few generations,» said Mark Meier, the study's lead scientist.

Furthermore, because the regression is being defined over ice age cycles where the biggest changes are related to the (now disappeared) North American and Fenno - Scandanavian ice sheets, the regression might well be much less for situations where only Greenland and West Antarctica are «in play».