Sentences with phrase «volume of ice sheets»

Predictions of future sea - level rise and reduction in volume of ice sheets are consistent with what the evidence indicates during the Last Interglacial.

While it's important to know the volume of an ice sheet - or how much space it takes up - it can change without affecting the amount of ice that is present.

The volume of the ice sheet is its asset.

Not exact matches

«That may not sound like a lot, but consider the volume of ice now locked up in the planet's three greatest ice sheets,» she writes in a recent issue of Scientific American.

«This new, huge data volume records how the ice sheet evolved and how it's flowing today,» said Joe MacGregor, the study's lead author, a glaciologist at The University of Texas at Austin Institute for Geophysics (UTIG), a unit of the Jackson School of Geosciences.

With a volume of more than 700,000 cubic miles and an average thickness of 4,000 feet, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) holds enough water to raise sea levels by 15 to 20 feet — and it is already sweating off 130 billion tons of ice per yeIce Sheet (WAIS) holds enough water to raise sea levels by 15 to 20 feet — and it is already sweating off 130 billion tons of ice per yeice per year.

During a record melting jag this past summer, the Greenland ice sheet lost 552 billion tons (19 billion tons lower than the previous low), and the volume of sea ice fell to half the volume it had four years ago.

Around 6 million years ago, the East Antarctic Ice Sheet expanded, stabilized and ceased producing large volumes of meltwater.

But the large volumes of data on Arctic sea and land ice that IceBridge has collected during its nine years of operations there have also enabled scientific discoveries ranging from the first map showing what parts of the bottom of the massive Greenland Ice Sheet are thawed to improvements in snowfall accumulation models for all of Greenlaice that IceBridge has collected during its nine years of operations there have also enabled scientific discoveries ranging from the first map showing what parts of the bottom of the massive Greenland Ice Sheet are thawed to improvements in snowfall accumulation models for all of GreenlaIce Sheet are thawed to improvements in snowfall accumulation models for all of Greenland.

What is alarming is that the volume of water and the extent and rapidity of its movement is suprisingly much greater than previously believed, and that a possible, perhaps likely, effect of this on ice sheet dynamics is to make the ice sheets less stable and more likely to respond more quickly to global warming than previously expected.

Greenland's ice sheet melted nearly 19 billion tons more than the previous high mark, and the volume of Arctic sea ice at summer's end was half what it was just four years ago, according to new NASA satellite data obtained by the Associated Press (AP).

«Conversely, there is more and better evidence across Iceland that when the ice sheet underwent major reduction at the end of the last glacial period, there was a large increase in both the frequency and volume of basalt erupted — with some estimates being 30 times higher than the present day.

Scientists have long suspected that the network of cracks in Europa's ice sheet could indicate a large volume of water underneath, and recent analysis of magnetic field data from the Galileo probe seems to confirm there is a salty ocean down there.

Measurements of ice sheet elevation changes indicate the volume of ice lost, and hence the contribution to sea levels, he tells Carbon Brief.

Further, melt - water of the floating ice - sheets will reoccupy same volume of the displaced water by floating ice - sheets causing no sea - level rise.

The latter is almost linearly related to changes in ice sheet volume; the former, however, is influenced by a range of factors, including atmosphere / ocean dynamics and changes in Earth's gravitational field, rotation, and crustal and the mantle deformation associated with the redistribution of mass between land ice and the ocean.

The typical estimate of the sea - level change is five metres, a value arrived at by taking the total volume of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, converting it to water and spreading it evenly across the oceans.

It must be pointed out that the ice has been thinning more appreciatively in west Greenland of late and that ice sheet melting can only contribute a moderate amount of freshwater volume each year.

So unless the perimeter of the Greenland ice sheet is the exact same thickness as the entire ice sheet (say 3 km on average), an area loss there, of 15 %, will produce a much smaller % volume loss, than say if this area loss were smack dab in the middle of the Greenland ice sheet.

This could also happen locally, such as with the the demise of a Greenland ice sheet after it reaches a certain critical volume.

Greenland's ice sheet has a total volume of 2,850,000 km ³ (so sayeth Wikipedia).

It would be interesting to compare the numbers, if any, for volume and time span of an ice sheet failure (are there any for how fast it could happen)?

The thermal inertia of the thousands of meter thick Greenland Ice sheet makes its integrative time constant even longer (> 20x volume, > 1000x thermal path length, nonlinear function due to rate dependencies).

The net loss in volume and hence sea level contribution of the Greenland Ice Sheet (GIS) has doubled in recent years from 90 to 220 cubic kilometers / year has been noted recently (Rignot and Kanagaratnam, 2007).

There are certainly better indicators of global warming trends — ice sheet volume, sea ice extent and sea surface temperatures all come to mind — but hurricanes get people's attention.

However, because they are partly submerged, their direct contribution to sea level rise is much smaller than the contribution made by the melting of an equivalent volume of (land - based) ice sheets.

The West Antarctic ice sheet has lost nearly two - thirds of its mass during this period, a volume sufficient to raise sea level 33 feet (10 m).»

[2] «If Earth's climate continues to warm, then the volume of present - day ice sheets will decrease.

On decadal and longer time scales, global mean sea level change results from two major processes, mostly related to recent climate change, that alter the volume of water in the global ocean: i) thermal expansion (Section 5.5.3), and ii) the exchange of water between oceans and other reservoirs (glaciers and ice caps, ice sheets, other land water reservoirs - including through anthropogenic change in land hydrology, and the atmosphere; Section 5.5.5).

Previous studies of the Antarctic ice sheet used satellite data to measure the volume of ice loss.

Scientists estimate the past volume of ice - sheets in the following way: As water freezes, different isotopes (types of chemicals) tend to freeze out at different rates.

Then in 2003 the launch of two new satellites, ICESat and GRACE, led to vast improvements in one of the methods for mass balance determination, volume change, and introduced the ability to conduct gravimetric measurements of ice sheet mass over time.

Already 80 per cent by volume of summer sea - ice has been lost, and regional warming of up to 5 ˚C may have already pushed the Greenland ice - sheet past its tipping point.

Let's assume ice volume was lost to a depth of one kilometer (the depth of the «grounding line» where the ice - sheet meets the earth).

Sorry — there is a fairly basic approximate volume calculation and a broad estimate of current ice sheet (not glacier) losses.

Some parts of the Antarctic ice sheet are also losing significant volume (very high confidence).

In the Arctic, there has been increased Eurasian river discharge to the Arctic Ocean, and continued declines in the ice volume of Arctic and sub-Arctic glaciers and the Greenland ice sheet (very high confidence).

Mercer (1968, 1978) proposed that atmospheric warming could cause the ice shelves of western Antarctica to disintegrate and that as a consequence the entire West Antarctic Ice Sheet (10 % of the antarctic ice volume) would lose its land connection and come afloat, causing a sea level rise of about five metrice shelves of western Antarctica to disintegrate and that as a consequence the entire West Antarctic Ice Sheet (10 % of the antarctic ice volume) would lose its land connection and come afloat, causing a sea level rise of about five metrIce Sheet (10 % of the antarctic ice volume) would lose its land connection and come afloat, causing a sea level rise of about five metrice volume) would lose its land connection and come afloat, causing a sea level rise of about five metres.

The new study, accordingly, uses a computer model of Antarctica to study the consequences of adding huge volumes of salt water to different portions of the ice sheet.

In subsequent millennia, as climate warmed and this ice sheet decayed, large volumes of meltwater flooded to the oceans [Tarasov and Peltier, 2006; Wickert, 2016].

«This height difference corresponds to roughly twice the volume from the melting ice sheets of Greenland,» said one of the authors, Roelof Rietbroek of the University of Bonn.

The global decline in glacial and ice - sheet volume is predicted to be one of the largest contributors to global sea level rise during this century (Ch.

Loss of glacial volume in Alaska and neighboring British Columbia, Canada, currently contributes 20 % to 30 % as much surplus freshwater to the oceans as does the Greenland Ice Sheet — about 40 to 70 gigatons per year, 66,78,63,57,64,58 comparable to 10 % of the annual discharge of the Mississippi River.79 Glaciers continue to respond to climate warming for years to decades after warming ceases, so ice loss is expected to continue, even if air temperatures were to remain at current leveIce Sheet — about 40 to 70 gigatons per year, 66,78,63,57,64,58 comparable to 10 % of the annual discharge of the Mississippi River.79 Glaciers continue to respond to climate warming for years to decades after warming ceases, so ice loss is expected to continue, even if air temperatures were to remain at current leveice loss is expected to continue, even if air temperatures were to remain at current levels.

Although the surface of the Greenland ice sheet can react rapidly to day - to - day weather changes, the melting of the volume of ice below is actually an inert process — driven by climatic changes instead of single meteorological events.

To say nothing of the warming trends also noticed in, for example: * ocean heat content * wasting glaciers * Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheet mass loss * sea level rise due to all of the above * sea surface temperatures * borehole temperatures * troposphere warming (with stratosphere cooling) * Arctic sea ice reductions in volume and extent * permafrost thawing * ecosystem shifts involving plants, animals and insects

They use a range of techniques to track changes in the volume of the ice - sheet over a 500 - year period, and compare it with measurements of ice - accumulation obtained by deep boring undertaken by Lonnie Thompson of Ohio State University.

Our simple scaling approximation implicitly assumes that ice sheets are sufficiently responsive to climate change that hysteresis is not a dominant effect; in other words, ice volume on millennial time scales is a function of temperature and does not depend much on whether the Earth is in a warming or cooling phase.

Ice - sheet volume is controlled by the balance between mass input and mass loss; mass input is almost entirely due to snowfall, and mass loss is from iceberg calving supplied by flow of the ice sheet, or runoff of melt watIce - sheet volume is controlled by the balance between mass input and mass loss; mass input is almost entirely due to snowfall, and mass loss is from iceberg calving supplied by flow of the ice sheet, or runoff of melt watice sheet, or runoff of melt water.

To a first approximation, sea - level changes reflect the volume of ocean water bound in continental ice sheets during the ice ages.

Shackleton (2000); changes of CO2 preceding changes in ice sheet volume were reported in Shackleton and Pisias (1985).