Sentences with phrase «calving front»

In the summer of 2008, Rignot's team measured salinity, temperature and current speeds near four calving fronts in three fjords in western Greenland.

«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.

Unlike the great ice sheet of Antarctica, the Greenland ice sheet is melting both on its surface and also at outlet glaciers that drain the ice sheet's mass through deep fjords, where these glaciers extend out into the ocean and often terminate in dynamic calving fronts, giving up gigaton - sized icebergs at times.

Historic photos and maps (from the 1800's to present) indicate a long term retreat of ice calving fronts on Greenland's glaciers.

Even temperate ice is quite strong and can sustain massive calving fronts.

SVS: Jakobshavn Glacier Calving Front Recession from 1851 to 2009.

The thermocline adjacent in the sea adjacent to the glacier calving front (where ice is discharged) lowered by 250 meters in the austral summer of 2012.

A sea of icebergs float near the calving front of Thurston Island, near western Antarctica.

At its calving front, where the glacier effectively ends as it breaks off into icebergs, some of the ice melts while the rest is pushed out, floating into the ocean.

This means that, even though the glacier is flowing towards the coast and carrying more ice into the ocean, its calving front is actually retreating.

By the end of this century, its calving front could retreat as far back as the head of the fjord through which the glacier flows, about 50 km upstream from where it is today.

The calving front of the glacier is now located in a deeper area of the fjord, where the underlying rock bed is about 1300 metres below sea level, which the scientists say explains the record speeds it has achieved.

I suppose that may have to do with in - between advancing of the glacier's calving front?

Is there a point where the mountains ringing Greenland open up such that as the calving fronts continue to retreat, they will begin to greatly widen?

Helheim Glacier is five kilometers wide and at the calving front less than 1 km thick, from 2001 - 2005 it retreated 8 km, you are looking at less than a contribution of 40 km3 for a five kilometer retreat over a span of four years.

According to the NASA map, the retreat of the calving front in the period 1929 - 1953 (24 years) was as large as the retreat in the period 1953 - 2003 (50 years).

In this case an imbalance of forces at the calving front propagates up - glacier.

The reduced resistive force at the calving front is then propagated up glacier via longitudinal extension in what R. Thomas calls a backforce reduction (Thomas, 2003 and 2004).

On Helheim the thinning and velocity propagated up - glacier from the calving front.

Thinning causes the glacier to be more buoyant, even becoming afloat at the calving front, and is responsive to tidal changes.

There has also been an alarming increase in the number of photographs of meltwater draining into a moulin somewhere on the GIS, often near Swiss Camp (35 km inland from the calving front).

On Jakobshavn the acceleration began at the calving front and spread up - glacier 20 km in 1997 and up to 55 km inland by 2003 (Joughin et al., 2004).

Of course, the calving front will be a spectacular 30 km across the main trunk and, where Columbia has earth on each side, the PIG has ice on both sides of the channel; so, it will be more complicated than the Columbia collapse.

I would caution the reader that no temp observations right near the calving front are available to document this to be the case.

That acceleration began at the calving front and spread upglacier 20 km in 1997 and up to 55 km inland by 2003 (Joughin et al., 2004).

The reduced resistive force at the calving front due to the thinner ice, now experiencing greater flotation, is then propagated «up glacier» (Hughes, 1986; Thomas, 2003 and 2004).

This idea was observed to be the cause of a brief seasonal acceleration of 10 - 20 % on the Jakobshavns Glacier in 1998 and 1999 at Swiss Camp 35 km inland from the calving front (Zwally et al., 2002).

The thinning between the grounding line and the calving front is mainly via melting as the snowline is at 900 m.

Illustrating the poor connection of the Petermann Glacier to its margin and lack of a stabilizing force this margin has, even 15 km behind the calving front.

The Petermann Glacier lost a substantial area, 29 km2 due to calving this summer (Box 2008c), and a crack well back of the calving front indicates another 150 km2 is in danger.

The calving front protrudes a mere 5 - 10 m above sea level, reflecting the fact that the ice at the front is only 60 - 70 m thick.

The mass balance at the calving front is the sum of the ice flux from upglacier, the rate of melting above and below the waterline and the iceberg - calving rate.

Acceleration at the calving front will then effectively pull on the ice upstream, stretching it causing further thinning and acceleration.

The reduced resistive force at the calving front due to the thinner ice, now experiencing greater flotation, is then propagated «upglacier» (Hughes, 1986; Thomas, 2003 and 2004).

Mass balance transfer to the calving front is a slow process with a large lag time (centuries) and is not capable of playing a meaningful role in the recent relatively large and sudden glacier accelerations (Pfeffer, 2007).

The calving front of Thwaites Ice Shelf photographed from the IceBridge research plane.

The calving front of the Jakobshaven Glacier in western Greenland in April 2012 Image: NASA ICE via Wikimedia Commons

More often, however, as with Gotley and its 11 neighbours, the icebergs break off as soon as the ice reaches sea level, so the calving front doesn't change much.

Between November 9 — 11, 2013, a large iceberg finally separated from the calving front of Antarctica's Pine Island Glacier.