Sentences with phrase «vast ice sheets»

And well, things don't look good: «The U.N. panel of climate scientists has projected that world sea levels will rise by between 18 and 59 cm this century, or more if a thaw of vast ice sheets in Antarctica or Greenland accelerates.»

Sea levels would keep rising for centuries because vast ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica thaw only slowly.

But, as Reuters points out, «Many people use the term «ice cap» to refer to polar sea ice or vast ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica.»

SUMMIT STATION, Greenland — At first glance, this research station on the highest point of Greenland's vast ice sheet doesn't look like much.

ITS vast ice sheets and monsoon run - off make the Tibetan plateau one of the largest sources of fresh water on an increasingly thirsty planet.

Updates appended A new analysis of Antarctica's vast ice sheet in a world heated by unabated greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel burning comes to a stark, if unsurprising, conclusion: Burn it all, lose it all.

These vast ice sheets are made of the snow that has fallen in Antarctica over the past million years or so.

Temperatures soaring above 10 °C caused more than a tenth of the island's vast ice sheet to start melting last week — a month before significant melt usually begins.

Over hundreds or thousands of years, vast ice sheets can melt away, further decreasing the planet's reflectivity.

Tucked beneath East Antarctica's vast ice sheet is a frozen world, complete with subglacial lakes, rivers, basins, volcanoes and mountains.

The Summit weather station in Greenland sits more than 3000 metres up atop the country's vast ice sheet.

At the peak of the last ice age, some 20,000 years ago, right outside my front door was a frozen glacier wall that rose as high as 300 feet, the southern edge of a vast ice sheet that covered Canada and the northern part of the United States.

Clues in the rocky debris To understand the thinning rate of a glacier from 8,000 years ago that no longer exists, the scientists turned to the mountains that jut up from the vast ice sheet.

But what have stalagmites in China got to do with the vast ice sheets that covered much of Europe and Siberia, and North America?

Ice cores drawn from Antarctica and Greenland have shown that carbon dioxide (CO2) levels in the atmosphere began to rise at roughly the same time as the vast ice sheets began to melt.

As the vast ice sheets that covered much of the northern hemisphere receded, human civilization blossomed, making the most of the relatively mild conditions that we still enjoy today.

When projecting how sea levels could rise over the coming centuries, one of the most difficult factors for scientists to gauge is how much of the Earth's vast ice sheets will melt, and how quickly.

The trends on Antarctica's vast ice sheets are mixed, as well.]

What you see here is «Swiss Camp,» an important science hub built in 1991 by the Swiss - born glaciologist Konrad Steffen on the western flank of the vast ice sheet.

The paper, in which a critically important Greenland ice core is analyzed by 133 authors from a host of research centers, concludes that the vast ice sheet largely endured over a period of 6,000 years that was warmer than what is forecast for coming decades.

There are a few other factors to consider too (decadal variations in continental storage of water mass, for example), but land - ice melt is accelerating and thermal expansion is not really going to be a factor throughout 21st Century - the disintegration of the vast ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica will be.

That has caused glaciers, ice caps, and the vast ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica to melt and break apart.

This later caused additional uplift to recreate the mountains, which were preserved by the vast ice sheet, which at 10million square kilometres, is as large as Canada.

Scientists measured how, within hours of the lakes forming, the vast ice sheets rose up, as if floating on water, and slid towards the ocean.

The data used in the study included more than 455,000 independent estimates of changes in the land elevation of the vast ice sheets covering Antarctica, both in the western part of the continent, where ice is melting more rapidly, and in the east, where the ice is considered to be more stable, for the time being at least.

The vast ice sheet on the island holds enough water to raise global sea levels by 7.36 meters (24.15 feet) were it all to melt, and the ice melt season of 2012 gave notice that an epic melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet may be underway.

While this vast ice sheet is relatively stable, the ice shelves — the portions of the ice sheet that extend into the surrounding seas — are fast disappearing.

When projecting how sea levels could rise over the coming centuries, one of the most difficult factors for scientists to gauge is how much of the Earth's vast ice sheets will melt, and how quickly.

The vast ice sheets that stretch across Greenland and the Antarctic are the most obvious suspects when it comes to the connection between melting ice and rising seas.

At some point, the positive feedback between melting and warming may become so great that the loss of the Arctic's vast ice sheets will be inevitable.

While Greenland's ice loss is astonishing, on the other side of the globe, parts of Antarctica's vast ice sheet may be even less stable.

The most direct evidence comes from tiny bubbles of ancient air trapped in the vast ice sheets of Antarctica.

And that's important when it comes to the vast ice sheet covering Greenland.