Sentences with phrase «of ice sheet behavior»

Since that report was released, scientists have worked hard to improve their understanding of ice sheet behavior and improve estimates of future sea level rise.

Not exact matches

Impacts of thermal expansion and melting mountain glaciers can be predicted with moderate confidence, but more uncertainty remains in the potential behavior of polar ice sheets.

But, rapid change in the behavior of parts of the Antarctic ice sheet might cause much greater rise than is often included in coastal planning.

The plume has been a factor in the ice sheet's behavior throughout its history, and recent surges in melting are the result of all the additional heat humans have pumped into it.

Murali Haran, a professor in the department of statistics at Penn State University; Won Chang, an assistant professor in the department of mathematical sciences at the University of Cincinnati; Klaus Keller, a professor in the department of geosciences and director of sustainable climate risk management at Penn State University; Rob Nicholas, a research associate at Earth and Environmental Systems Institute at Penn State University; and David Pollard, a senior scientist at Earth and Environmental Systems Institute at Penn State University detail how parameters and initial values drive an ice sheet model, whose output describes the behavior of the ice sheet through time.

«Incorporating all of these uncertainties is daunting, largely because of the computational challenges involved,» and to an extent, «whatever we say about the behavior of ice sheets in the future is necessarily imperfect,» note the authors.

Evidence of past glacial advance and retreat is also more easily observed in the Dry Valleys, providing a window into the past behavior of the vast Antarctic ice sheets and their influence on global sea levels.

But our understanding of the ice sheet's complex behavior before about 125,000 years ago has been fragmentary at best.

Surprise find The team's actual mission was to survey ocean currents near the Ross Ice Shelf, a slab of ice extending more than 600 miles (970 kilometers) northward from the grounding zone of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet into the Ross Sea, to model the behavior of a drill string, a length of pipe extending to the seafloor which delivers drilling fluids and retrieves sediment samplIce Shelf, a slab of ice extending more than 600 miles (970 kilometers) northward from the grounding zone of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet into the Ross Sea, to model the behavior of a drill string, a length of pipe extending to the seafloor which delivers drilling fluids and retrieves sediment samplice extending more than 600 miles (970 kilometers) northward from the grounding zone of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet into the Ross Sea, to model the behavior of a drill string, a length of pipe extending to the seafloor which delivers drilling fluids and retrieves sediment samplIce Sheet into the Ross Sea, to model the behavior of a drill string, a length of pipe extending to the seafloor which delivers drilling fluids and retrieves sediment samples.

«The past behavior and dynamics of the Antarctic ice sheets are among the most important open questions in the scientific understanding of how the polar regions help to regulate global climate,» said Jennifer Burns, director of the NSF Antarctic Integrated Science System Program.

The question now, experts said, is what the discovery of the bottoms - up ice formation means for efforts to understand ice sheet behavior and to investigate past climate by extracting ice cores.

Answering that question requires a solid understanding of the factors that affect the Antarctic ice sheet's behavior — how it adds and loses ice.

The findings, published yesterday in the journal Science, suggest scientists still have much to learn about the factors that govern the behavior of ice sheets — knowledge that is crucial to developing more accurate projections of future sea level rise.

«We see processes that operate in the climate system that either don't operate in glacial times we've seen in the last 2 million years, or they operate very differently,» she said, citing the behavior of ice sheets as an example.

Lack of knowledge about the ice sheets and their behavior is the primary reason that projections of global sea level rise includes such a wide range of plausible future conditions.

The information from the study helps improve scientists» understanding of the behavior of the ice sheet and what processes control the loss of ice, Beata Csatho, a geophysicist at the University of Buffalo in New York who was not involved with the work, said in a commentary published in the same issue of Nature.

Anandakrishnan, S., R.B. Alley, R.W. Jacobel and H. Conway, The flow regime of ice stream C and hypotheses concerning its recent stagnation, in R.B. Alley and R.A. Bindschadler, eds., The West Antarctic Ice Sheet: Behavior and Environment, American Geophysical Union, Antarctic Research Series, v. 77, p. 283 - 296 (200ice stream C and hypotheses concerning its recent stagnation, in R.B. Alley and R.A. Bindschadler, eds., The West Antarctic Ice Sheet: Behavior and Environment, American Geophysical Union, Antarctic Research Series, v. 77, p. 283 - 296 (200Ice Sheet: Behavior and Environment, American Geophysical Union, Antarctic Research Series, v. 77, p. 283 - 296 (2001).

«These are two of the largest and most rapidly changing glaciers in Antarctica, so the potential for their evolution to influence each other is important to consider in modeling ice sheet behavior and projecting future sea level rise,» Dustin Schroeder, a Stanford geophysicist who led the study, told Earther.

As Stefan discussed, any non-linear or threshold behavior of ice sheets could lead to sea level rising faster than this estimate.

The National Snow and Ice Data Center has inaugurated a useful new Web feature, Icelights, that offers the public a two - way portal for addressing questions about the behavior of sea ice and ice sheets and their relationship to the world far from the polIce Data Center has inaugurated a useful new Web feature, Icelights, that offers the public a two - way portal for addressing questions about the behavior of sea ice and ice sheets and their relationship to the world far from the police and ice sheets and their relationship to the world far from the police sheets and their relationship to the world far from the poles.

This result would be strongly dependent on the exact dynamic response of the Greenland ice sheet to surface meltwater, which is modeled poorly in todays global models.Yes human influence on the climate is real and we might even now be able to document changes in the behavior of weather phenomena related to disasters (e.g., Emanuel 2005), but we certainly haven't yet seen it in the impact record (i.e., economic losses) of extreme events.

We have a pretty good idea that the Heinrich events, with the most prominent bipolar seesaw behavior, are linked to ice - sheet behavior, but we're less confident about the non-Heinrich cold phases of the D / O oscillations (the cold phases do have more ice - rafted debris in these non-Heinrich cold - phases than in warm phases, but is that an ice - dynamical signal, a survival - of - icebergs signal, or something else?).

Until we have a very good grip on the behavior of ice sheets as their interior approaches 273K, and we understand just how heat is advected into ice sheets, we should not be making long - term plans for our cities.

Studies of this kind, which explore the ice sheet's past behavior, are critical to developing better predictions of how it will evolve in the future, Csatho says.

IPCC synthesis reports offer conservative projections of sea level increase based on assumptions about future behavior of ice sheets and glaciers, leading to estimates of sea level roughly following a linear upward trend mimicking that of recent decades.

Orbital forcing combined with a waning Laurentide ice sheet thus suppressed ENSO until around 5000 ka (1 ka = 1000 calibrated years before present), after which its behavior emerged from records of the Pacific region [42].

«The novel aspect of our study is that we discover biological processes play an important role in ice sheet behavior,» Stibal said.

We need greater attention on the strength of uncertain processes and feedbacks in the physical climate system (e.g. carbon cycle feedbacks, ice sheet dynamics)(NRC 2013), as well as on institutional and behavioral feedbacks associated with energy production and consumption, to determine scientifically plausible bounds on total warming and the overall behavior of the climate system (Heal and Millner 2014).

Until recently, the contribution of ice sheets to sea - level rise remained unknown and is still debated, but the current acceleration of sea - level rise is attributed to heating of the oceans and melting of land glaciers which is supported by measurements of ocean temperatures and the behavior of mountain glaciers, the vast majority of which are retreating or exhibit signs of instability.

They ran a climate model to take account of variations in sunlight and the rise and fall of CO2, then took snapshots from this model and fed them into a model for ice - sheet behavior and fed the result back into their climate model.

In understanding the behavior of ice sheets, attention is particularly focused on the boundary between the floating ice and grounded ice, which is usually called the grounding line, although in detail it is a zone with interesting but imperfectly understood properties (e.g., Schoof, 2007; Joughin et al., 2012a; Walker et al., 2013); see Figure 2.7.

Dr. Alley teaches, and conducts research on the climatic records, flow behavior, and sedimentary deposits of large ice sheets, to aid in prediction of future changes in climate and sea level.

The continental - scale behavior of the ice sheets depends upon difficult - to - model physics taking place at a much smaller scale.

«There's been a lot of speculation about the stability of marine ice sheets, and many scientists suspected that this kind of behavior is under way,» Ian Joughin, a glaciologist at the University of Washington in Seattle, said in a news release about one of the studies published Monday.

Forecasts of future ice sheet behavior appear even more uncertain: Under the same high — global warming scenario, eight ice sheet models predicted anywhere between 0 and 27 cm of sea level rise in 2100 from Greenland melt.