Sentences with phrase «bottom of the ice shelf»
As warm ocean water erodes the bottom of the ice shelf, the grounding line retreats inland.
discovermagazine.com
The findings, published Monday in Nature Geoscience, reveal that the 1997 - 98 El Niño led to a substantial loss of mass from the bottom of the ice shelves in West Antarctica's Amundsen sea sector, even as the shelves appeared to grow about ten inches taller from additional snowfall.
«As in addition to basal melting [melting at the bottom of the ice shelf], surface melting is an important contributor to thinning rates, particularly during the summer months.»
The effects have been imprinted onto the bottom of the ice shelves.
«Underneath these waves were much larger waves on the bottom of the ice shelves, caused by melting,» Bindschandler said.
Bindschandler and his team observed waves on the top of the ice sheets that were between 33 and 48 feet (10 and 15 meters) tall; when they correlated those to waves on the bottom of the ice shelf, there was a noticeable difference.
This change exposed the bottom of the ice shelf to colder surface waters rather than to the warmer, deeper layer, thereby reducing heat transfer from the ocean to the overlying ice and decreasing basal melting of the ice by more than 50 % compared to 2010.