The melting of the supergiant iceberg A-68 had a huge impact on the ocean around South Georgia, in sub-Antarctica, and significantly changed the Southern Ocean's temperature and saltiness, with potentially major consequences ...
Earth Sciences
12 hours ago
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A Canterbury climate modeler is part of an international team studying a 764-meter ice core that preserves more than 80,000 years of global climate data.
Earth Sciences
Sep 11, 2023
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The world saw another year full of extreme weather events resulting from climate change in 2022, from intense storms to soaring temperatures and rising sea levels. Antarctica was no exception, according to new research published ...
Earth Sciences
Sep 8, 2023
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Antarctica's vast ice masses seem far away, yet they store enough water to raise global sea levels by several meters. A team of experts from European research institutes has now provided the first systematic stability inspection ...
Earth Sciences
Sep 7, 2023
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In the Himalayas, not far from the base of Mount Everest, lies the Imja-Lhotse Shar Glacier, where David Rounce conducted his doctoral research. From 2013 to 2017, Rounce and his team visited Nepal to measure the glacier ...
Earth Sciences
Sep 6, 2023
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As global ice dams begin to weaken due to warming temperatures, a new study suggests that prior attempts to evaluate the mass of the huge floating ice shelves that line the Antarctic ice sheet may have overestimated their ...
Earth Sciences
Sep 1, 2023
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The Totten Glacier, located in the East Antarctica Ice Sheet, is also a major contributor to global sea-level rise. However, the details of how offshore ocean heat reaches the glacier's ice shelf cavity remain elusive. Now, ...
Earth Sciences
Aug 22, 2023
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Up to twice the amount of subglacial water that was originally predicted might be draining into the ocean—potentially increasing glacial melt, sea level rise, and biological disturbances.
Earth Sciences
Aug 21, 2023
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About 400,000 years ago, large parts of Greenland were ice-free. Scrubby tundra basked in the sun's rays on the island's northwest highlands. Evidence suggests that a forest of spruce trees, buzzing with insects, covered ...
Earth Sciences
Jul 23, 2023
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New analysis of samples collected from underneath Greenland's ice sheet reveal the Arctic island was much greener as recently as 416,000 years ago. The findings overturn previous views that Greenland's continental glacier, ...
Earth Sciences
Jul 22, 2023
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An ice sheet is a mass of glacier ice that covers surrounding terrain and is greater than 50,000 km² (20,000 mile²). The only current ice sheets are in Antarctica and Greenland; during the last glacial period at Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) the Laurentide ice sheet covered much of Canada and North America, the Weichselian ice sheet covered northern Europe and the Patagonian Ice Sheet covered southern South America.
Ice sheets are bigger than ice shelves or glaciers. Masses of ice covering less than 50,000 km2 are termed an ice cap. An ice cap will typically feed a series of glaciers around its periphery.
Although the surface is cold, the base of an ice sheet is generally warmer due to geothermal heat. In places, melting occurs and the melt-water lubricates the ice sheet so that it flows more rapidly. This process produces fast-flowing channels in the ice sheet — these are ice streams.
The present-day polar ice sheets are relatively young in geological terms. The Antarctic Ice Sheet first formed as a small ice cap (maybe several) in the early Oligocene, but retreating and advancing many times until the Pliocene, when it came to occupy almost all of Antarctica. The Greenland ice sheet did not develop at all until the late Pliocene, but apparently developed very rapidly with the first continental glaciation. This had the unusual effect of allowing fossils of plants that once grew on present-day Greenland to be much better preserved than with the slowly forming Antarctic ice sheet.
This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA
