Sentences with phrase «floating shelf ice»

This refers to the area in which the ice still touches the ground and merges into floating shelf ice.

Not exact matches

Concern has increased with recent failures of floating Antarctic ice, such as the Wilkins shelf.

Now large chunks of ice are floating away, and an enormous freshwater lake that floated on top of the 4,000 - year - old shelf has disappeared.

When the researchers modeled the impacts of these altered winds on Antarctica they found that they could drive warming of up to 1 °C of the waters at the depth of floating ice shelves along the Western Antarctica Peninsula.

From 500 feet up everything appeared in miniature except the giant ice shelves — seemingly endless expanses of ice, as thick as the length of several football fields, that float in the Southern Ocean, fringing the ice sheets that virtually cover the Antarctic landmass.

Melting of the ice shelves doesn't directly affect sea level rise, because they're already floating.

Larsen C, a floating platform of glacial ice on the east side of the Antarctic Peninsula, is the fourth largest ice shelf ringing Earth's southernmost continent.

The Antarctic ice sheet, the thick layer of ice covering much of the continent, is anchored in place by its floating fringe, shelves of ice that jut out into the surrounding ocean.

Dr Gudmundsson said: «Although floating ice shelves have only a modest impact on of sea - level rise, ice from Antarctica's interior can discharge into the ocean when they collapse.

In a shallow part of the sea floor underneath the ice shelf, a bedrock protrusion, named the Bawden Ice Rise, has served as an anchor point for the floating shelf for many decadice shelf, a bedrock protrusion, named the Bawden Ice Rise, has served as an anchor point for the floating shelf for many decadIce Rise, has served as an anchor point for the floating shelf for many decades.

When floating ice shelves disintegrate, they reduce the resistance to glacial flow and thus allow the grounded glaciers they were buttressing to significantly dump more ice into the ocean, raising sea levels.

This has included the complete disintegration of four ice shelves, the floating extensions of glaciers.

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 glacieice shelves in Pine Island Bay, the Antarctic Ice Sheet is once again at risk of losing mass from rapidly retreating glacieIce Sheet is once again at risk of losing mass from rapidly retreating glaciers.

Glaciers deliver that ice from the inner reaches of the continent to the ocean, where massive frozen shelves float atop the water.

Eventually, the floating ice shelf in front of the glaciers «broke up», which caused them to retreat onto land sloping downward from the grounding lines to the interior of the ice sheet.

Over the past few years, a large fracture has grown across a large floating ice shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula.

PACKED ICE Floating ice — 4 - or 5 - meters - thick in some places — choking the Weddell Sea ended a British Antarctic Survey research vessel's mission to the Larsen C ice shelf in February.

Break up of a floating «ice shelf» in front of the glacier left tall ice «cliffs» at its edge.

More than 12,000 years ago, Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers were grounded on top of a large wedge of sediment, and were buttressed by a floating ice shelf, making them relatively stable even though they rested below sea level.

Massive ice shelves — Antarctica's largest is bigger than California — get shoved off and float atop the ocean.

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.

As this happens, the floating ice shelf in front of it also lengthens and thins, increasing its chances of breaking and allowing even more ice to flow out from behind it.

Floating ice shelves mark the outermost edges of an ice sheet and line nearly half the Antarctic coastline.

The iceberg, which is likely to be named A68, was already floating before it broke away so there is no immediate impact on sea levels, but the calving has left the Larsen C ice shelf reduced in area by more than 12 percent.

Because the ice shelf was already floating, its break - up will not cause global sea levels to rise.

The British Antarctic Survey vessel R.R.S. Bransfield was anchored off an 800 - foot - thick frozen slab called the Brunt ice shelf when two passengers noticed some odd brown ball - like creatures floating by.

The northern section of the Larsen B ice shelf — a thick slab of floating ice on the eastern side of the Antarctic Peninsula — has collapsed and separated from the continent, researchers report.

Warm currents can melt the floating ice shelves that hold back ice on land.

That makes it vulnerable to collapse, because seawater can flow in underneath it and transform its edge into a floating ice shelf like Larsen B, which might then break up, freeing the ice behind it.

Warm ocean water, not warm air, is melting the Pine Island Glacier's floating ice shelf in Antarctica and may be the culprit for increased melting of other ice shelves, according to an international team of researchers.

However, most of the Antarctic glaciers are on land, and rapidly adding new ice shelf material to the floating mass will increase sea level rise.

The melting of floating ice shelves does not contribute to sea level rise because once they are in the water, the ice shelves have already contributed to sea level rise.

Only floating sea ice (bottom right) remains of the collapsed Larsen B ice shelf off the Antarctic Peninsula.

Slabs continued to calve and break up throughout the next 10 days; by March 8 the Wilkins ice shelf, comprising some 5,000 square miles of floating ice off the coast of the Antarctic Peninsula, had lost 160 square miles of ice to the Pacific Ocean.

The loss of floating ice shelves doesn't raise sea level directly.

Its floating front edge, the Totten ice shelf, sticks out like a tongue over the water and acts as a buttress for the giant glacier, slowing its movement toward the ocean.

In bays along the coast of Antarctica, thick shelves of floating ice extend tens or hundreds of miles out from the shoreline.

Most Antarctic researchers chalk this up to warm seawater melting the floating ice shelves at their bases; seawater temperatures there have risen since the 1970s, in part because of global temperature increases.

The ice shelf floats within a pool of its own cold meltwater that sits atop a deeper, saltier and warmer layer; the two layers generally don't mix, like oil and water.

First, floating ice shelves around Antarctica will soon be exposed to above - zero summer air temperatures, speeding their melt, he says.

Ice shelves are already floating in the water, so they don't contribute to sea - level rise in any meaningful way.

The rift runs for more than 50 miles from south to north across the ice shelf, which is a vast platform of ice floating atop the ocean.

Ice shelves (the floating front edges of glaciers that extend tens to hundreds of miles offshore) melt more because of contact with ocean water below them than they do because of sunlight.

The nearby Moscow University Glacier and its floating ice shelf were showing little change.

At this point, the ice becomes disconnected from the ground and turns into a kind of floating ledge, known as an ice shelf, that juts out into the ocean from the front of the glacier.

The grounding line is important because nearly all glacier melting takes place on the underside of this floating portion, called the ice shelf.

If global warming leads to an increase in monster storms, MacAyeal adds, then the entire Antarctic ice skirt could be in jeopardy: Larger sea swells could pulverize its huge icebergs and floating ice shelves.

They are called polynyas, formations that derive their name from the Russian word for «hole in the ice,» and are typically an expanse of open seawater along the coast that is enclosed by floating sea ice and the continental shelf.

That's because it appears that most of the action is happening beneath the ice shelves — those giant plains of floating ice that cling to the continent's edges.

One 2004 NASA - led study found that most of the glaciers they were studying «flow into floating ice shelves over bedrock up to hundreds of meters deeper than previous estimates, providing exit routes for ice from further inland if ice - sheet collapse is under way.»