Sentences with phrase «when glaciers flow»

Ice shelves are thick, floating platforms of ice formed when glaciers flow from the land onto the ocean surface.

Not exact matches

«Every single glacier that flowed into an ice shelf, when the shelf was removed, suddenly accelerated,» Scambos says.

When floating ice shelves disintegrate, they reduce the resistance to glacial flow and thus allow the grounded glaciers they were buttressing to significantly dump more ice into the ocean, raising sea levels.

When salt is buried under heavier rocks, it rises buoyantly in vast sheets and fingers; it may even fountain aboveground and flow like a glacier.

However, Roland tells us, the ice shelves can retard the flow of glaciers into the sea, and speed up glacier melt when they disappear.

Whales would surface beside our kayaks, leopard seals would ignore us as we floated by their ice flows, penguins would peck at our legs when we explored the sea shore and the icebergs and glaciers were huge.

Even without a melt the ice would form glaciers and the flow in to the sea to form icebergs which would melt when they reach warmer water in the gulf stream.

However, as Timothy explained in # 121, in addition to the direct sea level rise that occurs when ice shelves melt, there is a much larger secondary effect, in that ice shelves act as a brake, greatly reducing the rate of flow of the glaciers behind them from the land to the sea; and when ice shelves melt, the rate of glacier flow increases quite rapidly.

When pulses of warm water are strong enough to rise over the shelf's outer ridge, that warm dense water then flows downward to the grounding point of the glacier and remains there until a new equilibrium is established via basal melting and a retreating grounding point.

I have alluded to Phillips» opinion, because I see in Geikie's late work that reference is made to the fact that from the foot of glaciers in Greenland streams of water issue and unite to form considerable rivers, one of which, after a course of forty miles, enters the sea with a mouth nearly three - quarters of a mile in breadth — the water flowing freely at a time when the outside sea was thickly covered with ice.

Among the most comprehensive surveys ever done, it looked at floating glacier - ice shelves, which are connected to the land - based glacier from which they flowed, and tidewater glaciers that rest on land and break off into the ocean when they reach the water.

But even when averaged over the whole year, the glacier's flow has accelerated threefold since the 1990s.

Knowing what is driving ice - shelf melt is important because when ice shelves lose mass, they speed up the flow of land - bound glaciers that feed them, moving ice from the continent to the ocean, and contributing to global sea level rise.

Ice shelves are formed when glaciers meet the ocean and begin flowing out to sea.

This turns into a terrible Catch 22: When the flow increases, the glaciers get thinner and move away from solid land and become waterborne.

An ice sheet forms when snow falls on land, compacts into ice, and forms a system of interconnected glaciers which gradually flow downhill like play - dough.