Sentences with phrase «glacier bed»

The story goes — warmer temperatures, more surface melting, more meltwater draining through moulins to glacier base, lubricating glacier bed, reducing friction, increasing velocity, and finally raising sea level.

Moving inland from the edge of the WAIS, the glacier bed plummets farther below sea level and the ice gets thicker.

Once the margins failed, there was nothing at the glacier bed to hold it back, just water - soaked clay.

A mature channel system would successfully remove the meltwater, instead of having the meltwater fill the channels and spread out as a lubricant over more of the glacier bed.

This will reduce the effective pressure at the glacier bed, reducing friction and encouraging acceleration.

Joughin and others, 2008 observed that seasonal drainage of meltwater to the glacier bed induces a uniform acceleration of 50 — 150 meters / year over a ~ 300 km long section of the West Greenland margin that is not drained by outlet glaciers, causing a large fractional acceleration of the interior ice sheet but a small fractional change in the speed of fast - moving outlet glaciers.

Drumlins might look like eggs because they represent roughening of an originally smooth (flattish) glacier bed or, equally likely, smoothing of a rough bed.