Scientists reveal thinning of the ice melange could be a threat to Antarctica’s ice loss.
REPUBLIKA.CO.ID, KALIFORNIA — Glaciologists at the University of California (UCI), Irvine and the US Space Agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (NASA) examine the underlying dynamics iceberg release The Delaware-sized A68 of the Larsen C . ice sheet Antartika in July 2017. They found the possible cause was thinning of the ice melange. Melange ice is a molten mixture of windblown snow, iceberg debris, and frozen seawater that normally serves to repair cracks.
In a paper published in Prosiding National Academy of Sciences, reported in Phys, Tuesday (28/9), the researchers reported that their modeling study showed melange thinning to be the main driver of ice sheet collapse.
Circulation of seawater beneath the ice sheet and radiant heating from above, they say, have gradually worsened the ice sheet over decades.
The ice sheet is thought to support and prevent glaciers on land from flowing faster into the sea. This new knowledge of rift dynamics sheds light on the previously little known relationship between climate change and ice sheet stability.
“Depletion melange it that holds much of the floating ice sheet together is another way climate change could cause a rapid retreat of the Antarctic ice sheet,” said co-author Eric Rignot, UCI professor of Earth system sciences.
“With this in mind, we may need to rethink our estimates of the timing and rate of sea level rise from polar ice loss, that is, it could come sooner and with a bigger explosion than expected,” he explained.
Using NASA’s Ice Sheet and Sea Surface System Model, observations from the agency’s Operation IceBridge mission, and data from NASA and European satellites, the researchers assessed hundreds of fissures in the Larsen C ice sheet to determine which were most vulnerable to rupture.
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