Sentences with phrase «great ice sheets»

The great ice sheet in the north may be more resistant to warming than the great ice sheets in the south

The properties of the climate system include not just familiar concepts of averages of temperature, precipitation, and so on but also the state of the ocean and the cryosphere (sea ice, the great ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, glaciers, snow, frozen ground, and ice on lakes and rivers).

If the great ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica lose enough ice to raise sea level a metre or more, though, it would take thousands of years for snowfall to build up the ice sheets again.

How alarming depends on how quickly the great ice sheets melt in response to warming — and that is another big unknown.

Abundant liquid water newly discovered underneath the world's great ice sheets could intensify the destabilizing effects of global warming on the sheets.

«That may not sound like a lot, but consider the volume of ice now locked up in the planet's three greatest ice sheets,» she writes in a recent issue of Scientific American.

Set your time machine to fast - forward through the next few centuries, and watch as the great ice sheet above you slowly melts and spills into the sea.

Antarctica's great ice sheet is losing ground as it is eroded by warm ocean water circulating beneath its floating edge, a new study has found.

Roughly 20,000 years ago the great ice sheets that buried much of Asia, Europe and North America stopped their creeping advance.

Twelve thousand years ago, the great ice sheets retreated at the beginning of the latest interglacial — the Flandrian — allowing humans to return to northern latitudes.

The great ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica, which rise to over 13,000 feet above sea level, accumulate ice over most of their surfaces and melt only at their lower elevations near the edges.

Since devastating floods were a fact of life on the margins of the world's great ice sheets, people in those areas probably witnessed them.

If their conclusions are right, then the greatest ice sheets of the past were remarkably vulnerable, melting away when there was just a glimmer of extra sunlight.

Wind fields are capable of great volatility and very rapid global - scale teleconnections, and they are efficient generators of oceanic circulation changes and (more speculatively) of multiple states relative to great ice sheets.

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.

With each crack in the great ice sheets of the Arctic and Antarctica, and each tick upwards of Earth's thermometer, we are moving closer to the brink of broad disaster.

One year later, as I was heading to Greenland to write a feature on how the erosion of the great ice sheets there could substantially raise sea levels, another editor, Len Apcar, suggested I do a series of «Postcards From the Arctic.»

It's worth being reminded occasionally of the stunning scale of the world's great ice sheets and the glaciers that connect them with faraway coasts when cleaved icebergs (and flowing meltwater) outweigh the gain of mass from snowfall in the frigid interior, contributing to sea - level rise.

There are continuing major questions about the future of the great ice sheets of Greenland and West Antarctica; the thawing of vast deposits of frozen methane; changes in the circulation patterns of the North Atlantic; the potential for runaway warming; and the impacts of ocean carbonization and acidification.

Such phenomena, including the instability of Arctic sea ice and the great ice sheets at today's carbon dioxide amount, show that we have already gone too far.

«We found that several vulnerable elements in Earth's climate system — like the Amazon and other big rain forests, like the great ice sheets that have so much sea level locked up in their ice — could be pushed toward abrupt or irreversible change if we go on toward 2100 with our business - as - usual increase in emissions of greenhouse gases,» he said.

First, long before the two great ice sheets, Greenland and Antarctica, disappeared, we would lose all of the inland glaciers that currently provide most of the water for about a billion people.

But if the great ice sheet that covered most of North America to a depth of two miles had not melted owing to naturally - occurring global warming 10,000 years ago, where would the United States be today?

Worse, the great ice sheets atop and anchoring our planet are melting much faster than most scientists thought even a few years ago.

(16) While it would necessarily take many thousands of years to melt the great ice sheets, they had realized that meanwhile the atmosphere and the ocean surface waters, which were less massive, could be fluctuating on their own.

When the great ice sheets melted, the seas rose to its present height and the rivers carried silt from the highlands to build great delta plains where they met the sea,» deGrasse Tyson narrates.

The impact of the melting of the great ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica is the biggest unknown in projections of future sea - level rise.

But thanks to our 200 - year - long fossil - fuel binge, the great ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are starting to melt rapidly now, causing the rate of sea - level rise to grow exponentially.

Scientists are exploring the small but real possibility that even small shifts in ocean currents, possibly set in motion by global warming, may trigger the catastrophic melting of the world's two great ice sheets.

At both poles, the great ice sheets are showing worrying signs: recent calculations reveal that Greenland is losing more than 250 billion tons of water per year, and 87 percent of marine glaciers on the Antarctic Peninsula have retreated since the 1940s.

«Mountain glacier demise preludes the fate of the great ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica, if humanity does not come to its senses soon.

The great ice sheets might well continue to disintegrate, albeit slowly.

We are unable to say whether such events could happen to today's great ice sheets.

That's a key reason surface temperatures haven't appeared to warm as fast as many had expected in the past ten years — although ocean warming has sped up, and sea level rise has accelerated more than we thought, and Arctic sea ice has melted much faster than the models expected, as have the great ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica

Scientists have long puzzled over the origin of all the extra CO2 that appeared as the great ice sheets melted.