Sentences with phrase «of land ice»

In summary the melting of land ice floating on the ocean will introduce a volume of water greater than that of the originally displaced sea water, hence raising the water level a little.

The second reconstruction uses satellite gravity measurements to calculate the change in mass of land ice and land water.

And as they fall apart, the flow of land ice toward the sea accelerates, speeding up sea - level rise.

The instability appears to only occurs in a certain temperature ranges and when there is a large amount of land ice.

Ice shelves grow through a combination of land ice flowing to the sea and snow falling on their surfaces.

For recent years, better estimates of the land ice contribution to sea level are available from various observations of glaciers, ice caps and ice sheets.

The sea - level change associated with loss of land ice is responsible for these remarkable differences.

I wonder if the nearly constant sea level rise the last two decades despite increased melting of land ice can partly be explained by this difference in thermal expansion.

Ice shelves grow through a combination of land ice flowing to the sea and snow accumulating on their surface.

The accelerating melting of land ice into the sea makes the surface of the ocean around Antarctica colder, less salty and more easily frozen, leading to extensive sea ice in some areas.

They slow the flow of ice from the continent into the ocean and act as a buffer, preventing the formation of large cliffs of land ice.

However, the share of thermal expansion in global sea level rise has declined in recent decades as the shrinking of land ice has accelerated (Lombard et al 2005).

«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.

However, the actual sea level rise does match the upper limit of the IPCC's predictions, if the significant uncertainty about the behaviour of land ice is taken into account.

The Ross Ice Shelf, a floating body of land ice the size of France jutting out from the Antarctic mainland, continuously melts and grows in response to changes to both the ice sheet feeding it and the warmer Southern Ocean waters beneath it.

To understand sea - level change means understanding not only the transfer of land ice into the ocean, but also, for example, how the gravitational field of the Earth changes as inconceivably large water volumes shift around the planet.

Antarctica's ice shelves act as doorstops that hold back glaciers and the continent's vast stores of land ice.

The reasonable agreement in recent years between the observed rate of sea level rise and the sum of thermal expansion and loss of land ice suggests an upper limit for the magnitude of change in land - based water storage, which is relatively poorly known.

Widespread collapse of Antarctic ice shelves — floating extensions of land ice projecting into the sea — could pave the way for dramatic rises in sea level.

It is believed that on average, over the period from 1961 to 2003, thermal expansion contributed about one - quarter of the observed sea level rise, while melting of land ice accounted for less than half.

Figure 2 shows gravity measurements of land ice mass changes in Antarctica for the period April 2002 to February 2009 (Velicogna 2009).

Workshop Remote Sensing of Land Ice and Snow - Bern, March 2002, Proceedings.

Ice shelves act as giant buffers slowing the flow of land ice toward the ocean.

It is the ice underneath these much more massive chunks that is melting, which in turn causes pieces of land ice to break off and float out into the ocean, which is why the polar ice caps appear to be expanding.

IIUC sea level rise has three major components, melt, thermal expansion and chunks of land ice becoming sea ice / water.

And while it does not buttress a large amount of land ice, other ice shelves in Antarctica do hold back ice that makes sea levels rise.

They slow the flow of ice from the continent into the ocean and act as a buffer, preventing the formation of large cliffs of land ice.

This thermal expansion was the main driver of global sea level rise for 75 - 100 years after the start of the Industrial Revolution, though its relative contribution has declined as the shrinking of land ice has accelerated.

Concerning the two trillion tons of land ice that has melted since 2003, what percent of the total is this?

The new research found glaciers outside of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, repositories of 1 percent of all land ice, lost an average [continue reading...]

Spring has begun with an unprecedented early melt of land ice on Greenland.

Ice sheet - A mass of land ice that is sufficiently deep to cover most of the underlying bedrock topography, so that its shape is mainly determined by its dynamics (the flow of the ice as it deforms internally and / or slides at its base).