Sentences with phrase «ice sheet»
"Ice sheet" refers to a large mass of frozen water that covers a vast area of land, similar to a blanket of ice. It is like a very thick layer of ice that can be found in polar regions, such as Antarctica and Greenland. Full definition
So researchers need to look elsewhere for clues of ice sheet melt in the more distant past.
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Worst case scenarios of ice sheet melting and sliding lead to estimates of sea - level rise of the worrying 4 to 6 m.
The shallow curve for the pace at which seas will rise reflects the persistent questions surrounding the behavior of ice sheets in a warming climate.
In parallel we need significant investment in research on ice sheet models.
At present, most mass loss from ice sheets occurs at their marine margins, through iceberg production and melting by the ocean.
The study of ice sheet mass balance underwent two major advances, one during the early 1990s, and again early in the 2000s.
This figure shows that there was a slow cooling of climate over the last 3 million years as polar ice sheets grew partly in response to continental drift.
Additional positive feedbacks which play an important role in this process include other greenhouse gases, and changes in ice sheet cover and vegetation patterns.
We will explain more on ice sheet collapse later, but prior to about 1900, we know sea level was stable for several thousand years.
One major influence is the slow rebound of crust that was weighed down by massive ice sheets during the last ice age that have since melted away.
The paper also describes an atmosphere - ocean modeling study of feedback loops caused by ice sheet melting under 2 °C conditions.
Since the last of the continental ice sheet melted over 10,000 years ago the world has warmed for about 5,000 years and has been on a long cooling trend ever since.
With ice sheets pushing below 45 degrees of latitude, this looks close to a snowball - Earth condition which has a high climate sensitivity.
The resulting information will help improve computer models that predict how ice sheets change over time.
The questions on ice sheet dynamics have still not been answered, so there is no agreed upon answer.
In that period ice sheet surface melting increased from 40 to 97 percent.
By «instantaneous» he meant an advance of ice sheets over the course of a mere few thousand years, which was roughly ten times faster than most scientists had imagined.
If that happened a natural barrier to the flow of ice from glaciers and land - covering ice sheets into the oceans would be removed.
Such effect would delay the anticipated pace of ice sheet retreat.
But, until recently, scientists have struggled to get a grasp of exactly what happens when ice sheets are put under «thermal stress».
New research shows that small fluctuations in the sizes of ice sheets during the last ice age were enough to trigger abrupt climate change.
Ice shelves serve as a crucial barrier to prevent land - based ice sheets as well as glaciers from melting into oceans and increasing sea levels.
We are unable to say whether such events could happen to today's great ice sheets.
The major ice sheets take more than 10,000 years to disappear, a time scale a thousand times slower than some of the flip - flops in temperature.
This is because it is grounded below sea level, and marine ice sheets such as these are susceptible to rapid melting at their base.
The interplay between mile - thick ice sheets, a warming atmosphere, and shifting oceanic currents has been a tough task for scientists to tackle.
The main culprit seems to be ice sheets which become in contact with warmer ocean waters.
Probably the fraction under ice sheets was around half.
GPS and seismic measurements together provide a means to answer critical questions about ice sheet behavior in a warming world.
A key question has long been whether ice sheet contribution could accelerate substantially, by an order of magnitude, either in this century or subsequently.
However, in a case such as ice sheet instability and sea level rise, excessive caution also holds dangers.
This confirms that once ice sheets start to melt, they can do so very quickly.
These vary as sea level changes from growth or loss of ice sheets through the ice age cycles.
But it was long suspected that «orbital factors» weren't the whole story, as the southern hemisphere ice sheets melted back at the same time as the northern ones.
Slow feedbacks, such as change of ice sheet area and climate - driven changes of greenhouse gases, are not included.
Ice sheet flow is a function of surface slope and ice thickness.