Sentences with phrase «open cracks in the ice»
Large pools of melt water splotching the ice shelf probably forced open cracks in the ice.
https://www.sciencenews.org/ Not exact matches
The Russian and American scientists have never before experienced anything of such magnitude, and in addition to powerful emissions from shallow waters where over 100 readings were recorded, it is spewing up from within cracks in the Arctic ice in the open seas far from land.
As this water moves through rocks, it dissolves salt compounds and pushes through fractures in the overlying ice to form reservoirs closer the moon's surface, where it is expelled into space when the outermost layer of the crust cracks open and the resulting depressurization of these reservoirs causes water vapor and ice particles to shoot out in the observed plumes.
I assume every glacier is different, so there's no single answer whether meltwater is successfully penetrating through cracks to the base and staying melted, and whether stresses in the ice are opening cracks further, and which glaciers have beds sloping downhill going inland
Surface meltwater can penetrate through cracks in the surface, and force them open, allowing large amounts of water to drain to the bed and spread out across the base of the ice sheet, lubricating it (Zwally et al. 2002).
But in recent years, the ice has more often been internally fissured and riven with enormous «leads» — areas of open water that can form as the ice pack shifts and cracks — or melts.
This would be fundamentally different from events in the past where a crack in the ice might temporarily expose some open water at the pole in the midst of surrounding ice.
Or the news from Antarctica this past May, when a crack in an ice shelf grew 11 miles in six days, then kept going; the break now has just three miles to go — by the time you read this, it may already have met the open water, where it will drop into the sea one of the biggest icebergs ever, a process known poetically as «calving.»
As you can see, the sea ice in the Arctic has many holes and cracks in it, and lots of open water around it.