Sentences with phrase «of glaciers behind them»

However, as Timothy explained in # 121, in addition to the direct sea level rise that occurs when ice shelves melt, there is a much larger secondary effect, in that ice shelves act as a brake, greatly reducing the rate of flow of the glaciers behind them from the land to the sea; and when ice shelves melt, the rate of glacier flow increases quite rapidly.

All told, if the eastern and western Antarctic ice shelves were to melt completely, they would raise sea levels by as much as 230 feet (70 meters); the collapse of smaller shelves like Larsen B has sped up the flow of glaciers behind them into the sea, contributing to the creeping up of high tide levels around the world.

Sediment cores the team collected by drilling in front of the current Cosgrove Ice Shelf indicate that relatively warm ocean waters dissolved the vast ice shelf and even some of the glacier behind it about 2000 years ago, they recently reported.

Not exact matches

Once again, the demise of floating ice removed the backstop that stabilized glaciers behind it.

In a new study, Stuart Thomson, a geologist at the University of Arizona (UA) in Tucson, looked into the past by decoding sands deposited by the river, and the messy piles left behind by the glacier.

When the earth warmed and the glacier receded, the rubble was left behind as a series of low hills.

At the grounding line, the ice detaches from the bedrock and juts out into the water as a kind of floating ledge, or ice shelf, which helps to stabilize the glacier and hold back the flow of ice behind it.

But some of the debris, like boulders, drops out and is left behind as the glacier retreats.

The cosmic rays produce rare chemicals in the rocks, and by analyzing the concentrations of those chemical isotopes, researchers at Schaefer's lab are able to determine just how long ago the rocks were first exposed to the sun — and thus when they were left behind by the glacier.

These ice shelves are responsible for stabilizing the glacier and hold back the flood of ice behind them.

«The traditional view of the loss of land ice on Earth has been that mountain glaciers and ice caps are the dominant contributors, and ice sheets are following behind,» said study co-author Eric Rignot, a glaciologist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the University of California, Irvine.

Gray rubble on the flanks of Mauna Kea on the island of Hawaii lie in contrast to the red volcanic rock behind them, and were deposited by a glacier that disappeared thousands of years ago.

The team behind the current research looked at what we do know about Greenlandic and Antarctic glaciers, about the rates of flow and the factors that might prevent acceleration.

Melting glaciers turning land to bog was behind widespread extinctions of animals like the giant sloth and woolly mammoth between 15,000 and 11,000 years ago.

We stopped just a few times to admire the surroundings: the valley behind us that faded in and out of view with the clouds that passed over it, the needle - sharp ridges on each side that were too steep even for snow to stick, the thick glacier sitting just a few hundred feet to our right.

As the glacier / icefjord icebergs advance with a speed of over 30 m / day, any dam (how heavy it may be made) will be pushed away by the forces behind the ice front... Not to be forgotten the harsh winter freezing there...

A question that arose in subsequent online discussion was to what extent Oerlemans had relied on glaciers from tropical regions (answer: he didn't), and what the reasons are behind retreat of glaciers in these regions.

But there is this much physics behind it: both the melting of glaciers and the warming of ocean water is driven by the imbalance between incoming and outgoing heat energy.

A full explanation will require numerical modeling of glacier flow, but observations to date suggest that ice shelves act as «braking» systems on the glaciers behind them.

Glaciers as Reservoirs: Glaciers act as natural reservoirs storing water in a frozen state instead of behind a dam.

Also, the «response time» of glaciers reflect the past climate, but «teasing out the drivers of forces behind the observed changes, such as, shrinking of Quelccaya Ice Cap, are complex,» he says.

The researchers behind the study recorded the progress of ice caps and glaciers throughout the world over an eight - year period in order to estimate their contribution to sea - level rise.

At the grounding line, the ice detaches from the bedrock and juts out into the water as a kind of floating ledge, or ice shelf, which helps to stabilize the glacier and hold back the flow of ice behind it.

They then turned to the glacial lakes − bodies of water left behind as a glacier retreats.

The ice shelves act as giant buffers, slowing the flow of glaciers from the frozen land behind them.

I can; t get at the full paper, as it is behind a paywall and my Big Oil cheque seems to have been delayed yet again, but even the abstract says that the glacier advance was due to increased precipitation, and makes no mention of temperature.

Also from that article: «Michael Zemp and colleagues from the World Glacier Monitoring Service at the University of Zurich in Switzerland believe that warmer air temperatures in Europe in recent decades is behind the rapid loss of Alpine glaciers.

Loss of the Antarctic ice shelves, which extend from the southern polar land mass over the underwater continental shelf, are likely to result in the glaciers behind them flowing more rapidly into [continue reading...]

The flow of glaciers held behind the ice shelf accelerated.

With temperatures in the region rising fast, in line with global warming climate model projections, it seems the death of Patagonia's glaciers has man's hand behind it.