Her work provides an important piece of the puzzle of how glaciers move, what makes them speed up, and how they are
contributing to sea level rise as the climate warms.
Luckily, melting sea ice does
not contribute to sea level rise (only landlocked ice does, such as the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets), but many other problems remain.
CO2 is also
contributing to sea level rise because as CO2 enters the ocean, it warms up the water and the water expands, and when it expands it has to go somewhere meaning the ocean will get bigger and our beaches will get smaller.
What's going on in Antarctica may be even more worrisome than what's happening in Greenland, as I've noted (see Large Antarctic glacier thinning 4 times faster than it was 10 years ago: «Nothing in the natural world is lost at an accelerating exponential rate like this glacier» and «Q: How much can West Antarctica plausibly
contribute to sea level rise by 2100?»
Melting glaciers have a ranging set of effects on the environment and ecosystems,
from contributing to sea level rise, desalination of oceans and other less tangible effects on the world's jet streams as well as the ability to reflect sunlight.
In 2007 IPCC embraced a drastic revision: «New dataâ $ ¦ show [s] that losses from the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica have very likely
contributed to sea level rise over 1993 to 2003.»
«Ice sheets are
contributing to sea level rise sooner, and more than anticipated,» said Eric Rignot, a glaciologist at the University of California, Irvine, and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
Land - based ice in glaciers and ice - sheets will
keep contributing to sea level rise as long as melting exceeds snowfall accumulation; stopping the growth of temperature would not stop the net melting.
Anthropogenic forcing, resulting in thermal expansion from ocean warming and glacier mass loss, has very likely
contributed to sea level rise during the latter half of the 20th century.
A study using Earth Remote Sensing satellite radar interferometry (EERS - 1 and -2) observations from 1992 through 2011 finds «a continuous and rapid retreat of the grounding lines of Pine Island, Thwaites, Haynes, Smith, and Kohler» Glaciers, and the authors conclude that «this sector of West Antarctica is undergoing a marine ice sheet instability that will
significantly contribute to sea level rise in decades to centuries to come» (Rignot et al. 2014).
The Huffington Post: Greenland and Antarctica are home to the two largest ice sheets in the world, and a new report released Wednesday says that they are
contributing to sea level rise twice as much as they were just five years ago.
I understand that melting sea ice does
not contribute to sea level rise, but the fact that Antarctic sea ice is at record high levels seems inconsistent with proposed rapid melting of Antarctic ice sheets.
Melting glaciers have a ranging set of effects on the environment and ecosystems,
from contributing to sea level rise, desalination of oceans and other less tangible effects on the world's jet streams as well as the ability to reflect sunlight.
«Our primary question is how the Amundsen Sea sector of West Antarctica will
contribute to sea level rise in the future, particularly following our observations of massive changes in the area over the last two decades,» said UCI's Bernd Scheuchl, lead author on the first of the two studies, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters in August.
The Arctic has a lot of floating sea ice, and it is in the news a lot because it is decreasing dramatically, but sea ice loss in the Arctic does not
directly contribute to sea level rise.
She has conducted extensive research on the two largest masses of ice on Earth — the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets — with the goal of understanding how these entities are shrinking and
contributing to sea level rise as the planet's climate warms.
Warming temperatures have been chipping away at the Antarctic ice and
contributing to sea level rise.
If one part of an ice shelf starts to thin, it can trigger rapid ice losses in other regions as much as 900 kilometres away — contributing to sea level rise