Sentences with phrase «ice shelves play»

However, ice shelves play a very important role in «buttressing» their tributary glaciers.

Not exact matches

Suture zones are complex and more heterogeneous than the rest of the ice shelf, containing ice with different properties and mechanical strengths, and therefore play an important role in controlling the rate at which rifts grow.

But the same process of sea ice formation and brine production along coastal shelves plays a critical role wherever it occurs.

Surface melting is thought to have played a big part in the break - up of the nearby Larsen B ice shelf in 2002.

For example, some exciting work being done by David Pollard and Rob DeConto suggests that processes such as ice - cliff collapse and ice - shelf hydrofracturing may play important roles in future ice sheet behavior that have not been well incorporated into most ice sheet models.

Ice shelves are important, because they play a role in the stability of the Antarctic Ice Sheet and the ice sheet's mass balance, and are important for ocean stratification and bottom water formation; this helps drive the world's thermohaline circulatiIce shelves are important, because they play a role in the stability of the Antarctic Ice Sheet and the ice sheet's mass balance, and are important for ocean stratification and bottom water formation; this helps drive the world's thermohaline circulatiIce Sheet and the ice sheet's mass balance, and are important for ocean stratification and bottom water formation; this helps drive the world's thermohaline circulatiice sheet's mass balance, and are important for ocean stratification and bottom water formation; this helps drive the world's thermohaline circulation.

Meanwhile, compressed recordings of an Antarctic ice shelf are played through speakers, like slow, foreboding sirens.

There is already strong evidence that anthropogenic forcing has played a significant role in the collapse of ice shelves on the Antarctic Peninsula, cause by significant melting at the surface during summer.

Larsen B glaciers are too small to significantly affect sea level, but the processes that acted on this area could play out on other, bigger ice shelves.

«We conclude that ice - shelf basal melting plays a role in determining patterns of surface and basal crevassing.

That suggests that the 1940s tropical warming could have started the changes in the Amundsen Sea ice shelves that are being observed now... He emphasized that natural variations in tropical sea - surface temperatures associated with the El Niño Southern Oscillation play a significant role.»

Indeed, the long lifetime of fossil fuel carbon in the climate system and persistence of the ocean warming ensure that «slow» feedbacks, such as ice sheet disintegration, changes of the global vegetation distribution, melting of permafrost, and possible release of methane from methane hydrates on continental shelves, would also have time to come into play.

Recent fieldwork at the Larsen C ice shelf, a much bigger one, showed that the same process may soon play out there.

They calculated that only 13 % of the total ice shelf area of Antarctica could be called «passive» ice − that is, it plays no role in buttressing or slowing the land - borne ice.

The shelf ice plays an important role in slowing the progress of south polar glaciers: remove the shelf ice and the glacier flow accelerates.