By John D. Cox28 July 2011 Before the last ice age, during a warm era some 125,000 years ago that was comparable to modern times, scientists know that the oceans reached levels that were some 15 to 20 feet higher than they are today. What they don’t know is, where did the extra water come […]
By Daniel Stolte, University Communications 14 July 2011 Melting ice sheets contributed much more to rising sea levels than thermal expansion of warming ocean waters during the Last Interglacial Period, a UA-led team of researchers has found. The results further suggest that ocean levels continue to rise long after warming of the atmosphere levels off. […]
Washington, April 22 (IANS) – Melting glaciers and ice caps on Canadian Arctic islands play a much greater role in sea-level rise than scientists previously suspected. For instance, the 550,000-square-mile Canadian Arctic Archipelago contains some 30,000 islands. Between 2004 and 2009, the region lost the equivalent of three-quarters of the water in Lake Erie, found […]
Caption by Mike Carlowicz, with background from Alan BuisMarch 26, 2011 According to a new NASA-funded satellite study, the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are losing mass at an accelerating pace and are overtaking ice loss from mountain glaciers and ice caps to become the dominant contributor to global sea level rise. The graph above […]
ScienceDaily (Mar. 8, 2011) — The Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are losing mass at an accelerating pace, according to a new NASA-funded satellite study. The findings of the study — the longest to date of changes in polar ice sheet mass — suggest these ice sheets are overtaking ice loss from Earth’s mountain glaciers […]
Caption by Holli Riebeek24 February 2011 How could melting ice thousands of miles away possibly affect you? A recent study published in Nature Geoscience provides one answer to that question. Mark Flanner at the University of Michigan and his collaborators used satellite data to measure how much changes in snow and ice in the Northern […]
February 21, 2011 (PhysOrg) – The contribution of Greenland to global sea level change and the mapping of previously unknown basins and mountains beneath the Antarctic Ice Sheet are highlighted in a new film released by Cambridge University this morning. The work of glaciologist Professor Julian Dowdeswell, Director of Cambridge University’s Scott Polar Research Institute, […]
Anomaly map of Greenland melting days for 2010 derived from passive microwave data. Hatched regions indicate where MAR-simulated meltwater production exceeds the mean by at least two standard deviations. Abstract: Analyses of remote sensing data, surface observations and output from a regional atmosphere model point to new records in 2010 for surface melt and albedo, […]
ScienceDaily (Jan. 26, 2011) — Hotter summers may not be as catastrophic for the Greenland ice sheet as previously feared and may actually slow down the flow of glaciers, according to new research. A letter published in Nature on 27 January 2011 explains how increased melting in warmer years causes the internal drainage system of […]
The figure shows the standardized melting index anomaly for the period 1979 – 2010. In simple words, each bar tells us by how many standard deviations melting in a particular year was above the average. For example, a value of ~2 for 2010 means that melting was above the average by two times the ‘variability’ […]
