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.
Not exact matches
But our
understanding of the
ice sheet's complex
behavior before about 125,000 years ago has been fragmentary at best.
«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.
Answering that question requires a solid
understanding of the factors that affect the Antarctic
ice sheet's
behavior — how it adds and loses
ice.
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.
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.
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.
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.