Sentences with phrase «giant sheets of ice»

Not exact matches

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.

The two studies improve our understand of Greenland's deep past, while raising questions about both the past and future of its giant ice sheet in a changing climate.

Shelf ice, as found in Antarctica, refers to giant floating ice sheets that can span thousands of square kilometres.

Our global climate models zoom down to finer and finer resolutions; our satellites reveal remote corners of the globe; we increase our understanding of the response of giant ice sheets and deep ocean currents to a warming planet.

«Hot rock and ice: Volcanic chain underlies Antarctica: Seismic maps of the mantle will improve predictions of giant ice sheet's fate.»

A few days later, back at her office whiteboard, she thought about the collapsed sheet of ice above each lake, full of giant fractures like the ones above Grimsvotn.

Even more worrying, and very likely, is the collapse of the giant Greenland ice sheet.

During the last ice age, much of North America was covered by a giant ice sheet that many scientists believe underwent several catastrophic collapses, causing huge icebergs to enter the North Atlantic — phenomena known as Heinrich events.

One interesting update — which certainly got some media attention in the UK — was the British Antarctic Survey director Prof. Chris Rapley's revision of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet from «slumbering giant» (IPCC TAR) to «giant awakened».

2:10 p.m. Updated Lora Koenig of NASA just sent this note providing the reference underlying her comment about past summer melting episodes at the summit (the spot on the giant ice sheet least vulnerable to melting):

The longer global warming continues, the greater the risk of «waking the sleeping giants» — major feedbacks such as ice sheet collapse, methane «burps,» or ecosystem collapse — that could ignite abrupt or runaway warming beyond our control.

The inland - retreating Isbrae itself is a vast field of giant ice sheets.

Starting this month, a giant NASA DC - 8 aircraft loaded with geophysical instruments and scientists will buzz at low level over the coasts of West Antarctica, where ice sheets are collapsing at a pace far beyond what scientists expected a few years ago.

The miles - thick ice - sheets of Antarctica continue to surprise scientists, as they attempt to prise out the secrets from deep within the southern hemisphere's giant ice locker.

A recently developed technology called cosmogenic exposure age dating is now being used at Aberystwyth University to determine the length of time the granite boulders were exposed to the sun, giving scientists important information about when the possible expansion and retraction of the giant ice sheet took place.

North of here was mostly ice: a giant mountain of it sat atop Scandinavia — that's why northern Germany and Poland look so flattened — and another ice sheet sat atop Canada, as tall as a mountain range.

A local trigger for the Younger Dryas, in particular, was suggested by the fossil shorelines of a giant lake of fresh water that had been dammed up behind the North American ice sheet.

Pine Island Glacier is a giant, an outlet glacier draining about 160,000 km2 of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.

The collapse of the giant West Antarctic ice sheet is underway, two groups of scientists said Monday.