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Topic: Ice sheet

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	Ice sheet - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		An ice sheet is a mass of glacier ice that covers surrounding terrain and is greater than 50,000 km² (19,305 mile²).
		The only current ice sheets are Antarctic and Greenland; during the last ice age 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.
		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.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Ice_sheet (475 words)

	West Antarctic Ice Sheet - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		Away from the interior, the ice is channelled into anomalously fast-flowing ice streams, transporting ice from the center of the continent to the sea.
		The inter-stream ridges are frozen to the bed while the bed beneath the ice streams consists of water-saturated clay.
		In January 2006, in a UK government-commissioned report, the head of the British Antarctic Survey, Chris Rapley, warned that this huge west Antarctic ice sheet may be starting to disintegrate, an event that could raise sea levels by 16 feet.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/West_Antarctic_Ice_Sheet (744 words)

	ice sheet - Hutchinson encyclopedia article about ice sheet (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-18)
		Body of ice that covers a large land mass or continent; it is larger than an ice cap.
		During the last ice age, ice sheets spread over large parts of Europe and North America.
		The ice sheet covering western Greenland has increased in thickness by 2 m/6.5 ft 1981–93; this increase is the equivalent of a 10% rise in global sea levels.
	encyclopedia.farlex.com /ice+sheet (172 words)

	The Greenland Ice Sheet: What it Reveals about Creation and Noah's flood (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-18)
		What is extremely interesting is that the Greenland Ice Sheet, the Mount Kilimanjaro glacier in Africa, the Huascaran glacier in Peru, and even the undersea sediments of the Gulf of Oman, all have anomalous indicators that correlate to around 4,300 to 4ka years BP.
		At the bottom of the GISP2 bore hole the temperature is -9° C and shows that the ice sheet is frozen tight to the bedrock.
		As the flood waters receded, the ice sheet would then gently settle back down and eventually fuse over the submerged ice that had not broken away, because the remaining bottom ice was still frozen solid to the bedrock.
	www.christiangeology.com /greenland_ice_sheet.html (2666 words)

	Fact Sheet: Ice Shelves
		The weight of Antarctica's ice is so enormous that it has literally pressed the continent two thirds of a mile (one kilometer) into the earth.
		During normal years, the total mass of calvings is an extremely small percentage of the ice cap, and the ice lost through calving equals the mass of snowfall on the continent.
		Three more shelves, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the University of Colorado, have receded past a "point of no return." These three are the Larsen B, the Wilkins, and the George VI Ice Shelves.
	www.asoc.org /general/iceshelve.htm (995 words)

	Research on the Laurentide Ice Sheet
		The plan is to isolate mechanisms of abrupt change on the order of hundreds of years in the ice sheet that are large enough to trigger climate changes captured as time “snapshots” by our coupled global and regional atmospheric climate models.
		This includes the wind field over the ice sheet as influenced by icesheet topography, the proglacial lakes bordering on the ice sheet, the fine-resolution mesoscale climate of North America, and global change.
		If fluctuations in the Laurentide Ice Sheet triggered climate changes, then the possibility exists that present-day ice sheets covering Greenland and Antarctica may be able to trigger similar climate changes, with all the social, economic, and political consequences.
	www.ume.maine.edu /iceage/Research/projects/laurentide.html (559 words)

	Ice Sheet Modeling - Contribution #17
		The ice sheet margin is identified by glacial geological indicators, and then the interior thickness can be calculated from various conservation laws and constitutive relationships.
		The primary inputs to an ice sheet model are the bed topography, the accumulation rate, the surface temperature, and the geothermal heat flux.
		Ice sheet modeling requires a representation of the bed topography with a spatial resolution comparable to the ice thickness.
	www.climatechange.umaine.edu /Research/Contrib/html/17.html (658 words)

	CVO Website - Glaciations and Ice Sheets
		Subsequent overrunning by the ice sheet modified this surface in several ways: most pervasively, by the deposition of basil till, which was commonly shaped into drumlins, and most notably, by the excavation of deep linear troughs now occupied by large lakes and the marine waters of Puget Sound.
		Within the ice filled Grimsvötn caldera intense geothermal activity continuously melts the ice to form a subglacial lake, which at intervals of 5 to 10 years is emptied along subglacial channels to create large floods (jökulhlaup) on the sandur plain, Skeidararsandur, on the Icelandic south coast.
		The spatial and temporal relations between ice sheets and alpine glaciers have important implications for the biogeography of endemic taxa; suitable habitat for alpine plants evidently persisted in or near the Olympic Mountains during both alpine and ice sheet advances of the Fraser glaciation.
	vulcan.wr.usgs.gov /Glossary/Glaciers/IceSheets/description_ice_sheets.html (7881 words)

	Top Story - CRACKS IN THE ICE - NEW INSIGHTS INTO ANTARCTIC ICE SHEET FAILURES - January 17, 2001
		Ice shelves are the edges of those glaciers, extending out into the ocean faster than ice bergs can break off from the edge.
		Ice shelves are considered to be particularly sensitive to climatic changes and scientists have detected a marked retreat along the Antarctic Peninsula.
		That floating ice, connected to the shore by ice sheets and glaciers, displaces a volume of water equal to the volume of water contained in the shelf.
	www.gsfc.nasa.gov /topstory/20010117ice.html (1683 words)

	The Antarctic ice sheet and rising sea levels (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-18)
		Ice is lost through the calving of icebergs, and by melting year-round from the base of ice shelves.
		It showed that most of the ice sheet is close to balance, but there were only a few years of satellite data and not all of the ice sheet was covered.
		Although a change in floating ice has no impact on sea level (it already displaces its own mass of water), any change in the grounded ice sheet will affect sea level directly.
	www.antarctica.ac.uk /Key_Topics/IceSheet_SeaLevel (427 words)

	CNN - West Antarctic ice sheet not in jeopardy - December 1, 1998
		The ice sheet is the largest grounded repository of ice on the planet and some scientists caught up in the debate over global warming have argued that the melting of this ice sheet would lead to a dramatic rise in sea levels.
		The international team of scientists, who reported their findings in the journal Science, analyzed five years of satellite radar measurements covering a large part of the Antarctic ice sheet in an effort to determine if there is any direct evidence of the ice sheet melting.
		While the researchers had to devise new algorithms to decipher the raw, ice sheet data and correct for several variables such as radar penetration below the ice surface and snow accumulation, they say the study represents the longest time series for which data is available.
	www.cnn.com /TECH/science/9812/01/icesheet.yoto (640 words)

	New Scientist Antarctic ice sheet is an 'awakened giant' - Breaking News (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-18)
		The massive west Antarctic ice sheet, previously assumed to be stable, is starting to collapse, scientists warned on Tuesday.
		The last report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, published in 2001, said that collapse of this ice sheet was unlikely during the 21st century.
		Changes on the peninsula, where 75% of the 400 mountain glaciers are in retreat, have provided new insights into the ways that ice sheets may disintegrate.
	www.newscientist.com /channel/earth/dn6962 (532 words)

	What Is Happening to the West Antarctic Ice Sheet?
		The size of the ice sheet depends on snow accumulation, wind-driven reduction of glacial snow and ice, iceberg splitting, and subglacial melting and freezing.
		Ice domes and divides are the most stable locations for deposition and glacial archiving of samples of past atmosphere.
		Ice coring at Siple Dome, begun in late 1997, is expected to contribute a detailed historical record of atmospheric chemistry and surface elevation.
	www.agu.org /sci_soc/articles/bind.html (2005 words)

	Environment News Service (ENS)
		Rignot is a principal investigator on NASA funded projects to study the mass balance of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets using radar interferometry combined with other methods; the interactions of ice shelves with the ocean; and the retreat of Patagonian glaciers.
		But some scientists have suggested that overall annual snowfalls on the Antarctic ice sheet appear roughly to be balanced by the loss of ice due to melting or the breakup into icebergs.
		Rignot presented data that shows ice shelves and glaciers in East Antarctica are thinning and losing mass, even though ice in that area is thought to be thickening overall due to increased amounts of snow and rainfall.
	www.ens-newswire.com /ens/oct2005/2005-10-18-02.asp (1070 words)

	Top Story - GREENLAND ICE SHEET FLOWS FASTER DURING SUMMER MELTING - June 06, 2002
		The results suggest that the ice sheet may be responding more quickly to the warming climate than previously thought.
		The faster ice flow, ice thinning and consequent lowering of the surface elevation of the ice sheet can open a feedback to more melting that has not been considered in computer models that predict ice sheet response to climate change.
		Zwally and his colleagues speculate that increased movement of the ice sheet due to more meltwater underneath the ice sheet may have contributed to the demise of the Laurentide ice sheet approximately 10,000 years ago.
	www.gsfc.nasa.gov /topstory/20020606greenland.html (961 words)

	Antarctic Ice Sheet Is Melting Rapidly
		The Antarctic ice sheet is losing as much as 36 cubic miles of ice a year in a trend that scientists link to global warming, according to a new paper that provides the first evidence that the sheet's total mass is shrinking significantly.
		Richard Alley, a Pennsylvania State University glaciologist who has studied the Antarctic ice sheet but was not involved in the new research, said more research is needed to determine if the shrinkage is a long-term trend, because the new report is based on just three years of data.
		Scientists have been debating whether the Antarctic ice sheet is expanding or shrinking overall, because the center of the sheet tends to gain mass through snowfall whereas the coastal regions are more vulnerable to melting.
	www.washingtonpost.com /wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/02/AR2006030201712.html (906 words)

	Climate Warning Index (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-18)
		Climate models show that in a warmer future climate, there will be more snowfall (at higher elevations) and therefore the ice sheet mass may remain in balance and not contribute as much to GSLR as current trends indicate.
		The Greenland ice sheet is changing states as noted in our parent topic Arctic Warming And Greenland — the analogy is to the inertia of a big, round rock that is now starting to roll downhill.
		And, as we know from paleoclimate ice core studies, abrupt temperature shifts in the climate state in Greenland is a exemplar of abrupt climate change.
	www.climatewarning.org /topics/greenland.html (782 words)

	USATODAY.com - Ice clarifies climate's secrets (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-18)
		The pink ice is from water that re-froze after being melted by geothermal heat, which melts a thin layer of ice at the very bottoms of some parts of ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica.
		The ice from the ice age stretched as far south as what is now the northern USA.
		Melting of large ice sheets almost surely disrupted global ocean currents, probably causing the abrupt swings in global temperatures that occurred between 11,000 and 15,000 years ago.
	www.usatoday.com /tech/science/discoveries/2004-08-30-ice-climate_x.htm (761 words)

	SVS Science Story: Greenland's Receding Ice (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-18)
		Quantified conservatively, the study indicates a net loss of roughly 51 cubic kilometers of ice per year from the entirety of the Greenland ice sheet.
		Greenland's coastal ice is disappearing fast enough that at its current rate of decline it will contribute to a rise in the world's oceans of a little less than a centimeter in the space of a single human lifetime.
		By comparing changes in ice thickness taken in 1999 to measurements made earlier in the decade, they concluded that the continent is giving up nearly 50 gigatons--that¹s 50 billion tons--of water per year, with greatest losses coming from the eastern coast.
	svs.gsfc.nasa.gov /stories/greenland (1473 words)

	Arctic Sea Ice Shrinking, Greenland Ice Sheet Melting, According To Study (New Release)
		The total area of surface melt on the Greenland Ice Sheet for 2002 broke all known records for the island and the extent of Arctic sea ice reached the lowest level in the satellite record, according to scientists at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
		The 2002 sea-ice record is the most recent evidence of a downward trend in Arctic sea ice in the decades since satellite monitoring began, said Research Associate Mark Serreze, lead author on a 2002 paper on sea ice extent and area in the Arctic.
		In addition, melt water has been shown to directly affect the rate of ice flow off Greenland, penetrating the ice sheet and causing the glaciers to accelerate in speed as they slide over a thin film of melt water.
	nsidc.org /news/press/20021207_seaice.html (870 words)

	Glaciers and Ice Sheets
		A Glacier is any large mass of perennial ice that originates on land by the recrystallization of snow or other forms of solid precipitation and that shows evidence of past or present flow.
		The ice sheet on Antarctica is over 4200 meters thick in some areas, covering nearly all of the land features except the Transantarctic Mountains, which protrude above the ice.
		A NASA study of Greenland’s ice sheet reveals that it is rapidly thinning.
	www.solcomhouse.com /icecap.htm (2170 words)

	Mass Balance of the Greenland Ice Sheet using precision GPS measurements (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-18)
		The ice sheet is probably changing size, and therefore altering sea level, as a response to changes in climate and ice flow over the last 10,000 years.
		One approach is to calculate local rates of ice sheet thickness change using precision GPS methods (the so-called "coffee-can" technique).
		This technique entails comparison of ice vertical velocities, obtained from GPS, with long-term rates of snow accumulation, derived from ice core stratigraphy.
	www.ume.maine.edu /iceage/Research/projects/Greenland/home.htm (234 words)

	Maximum Melt Extent on Greenland Ice Sheet, 2002
		The total area of surface melt on the Greenland Ice Sheet broke all known records for the island according to scientists at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
		Analysis of melt extent on the Greenland ice sheet using passive microwave satellite data have shown a very dramatic increasing melt trend since 1979 which appeared to be interrupted only in 1992 by the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo.
		Greenland ice sheet maximum melt area increased on average by 16% from 1979 to 2002.
	cires.colorado.edu /steffen/melt (424 words)

	BBC NEWS \| Science/Nature \| Antarctica's ice sheet melting naturally
		As the ice began to melt away and the glaciers retreated, rocks where left behind on the freshly uncovered mountains.
		Ice sheets in North America and Europe had nearly all melted 10,000 years ago, but this process had only just started in West Antarctica at that time.
		As much of the ice sheet is below water, the WAIS could be very sensitive to the warming of the oceans.
	news.bbc.co.uk /1/hi/sci/tech/2624603.stm (432 words)

	DAAC Study: Vanishing Ice
		Konrad Steffen arrived on the Greenland Ice Sheet for the 2002 summer fieldwork season and immediately observed that something significant was happening in the Arctic.
		The low sea ice levels in 2002 seem to be part of a general downward trend in Arctic sea ice over the past 24 years, which appears to be driven by a combination of higher temperatures and altered wind fields that tend to break up the ice cover.
		It also increases the rate of ice flow off Greenland, because the meltwater penetrates the ice sheet and forms a thin film between the ice and bedrock, which causes the glaciers to slide off the continent faster.
	earthobservatory.nasa.gov /Study/vanishing (1999 words)

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