Sentences with phrase «icy soil»

We can certainly see some melting here, though without any frame of reference, we can not tell if these are football - sized chunks of icy soil or football field sized chunks.

As the permafrost disappears, carbon - rich material like grass roots, once trapped in icy soil, sinks to lake bottoms, where bacteria convert it into the greenhouse gas methane.

But the team calculates that if the layer of rock and icy soil above the water table is particularly conductive, it could be absorbing enough energy from the radar to obscure a telltale signal.

The Phoenix lander, on course to reach Mars on May 25, will assess habitability of a shallow subsurface environment of icy soil farther north than any earlier mission has landed.

And that's because of the permafrost, the vast subterranean body of icy soils throughout the Arctic region whose total carbon content is estimated to be roughly double what's currently in the atmosphere.

Peatlands — which include bogs, other swampy wetlands and, yes, Greenland's icy soil — are ecosystems rich in decayed organic matter.

Instead, much of the work on permafrost degradation over the past few decades has focused on the widespread, slow melting of the icy soils from the top down, says Vladimir Romanovsky, a geophysicist at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, who was not involved in the new study.

In June the probe's eight - foot - long robotic arm exposed white patches of ice in the rust - colored Martian dirt; in July it took bits of the icy soil and studied its composition.

«If the stain is only a thin, colored veneer on the icy soil, exposure to the space environment at Tethys» surface might erase them on relatively short time scales.»