Basal Melt Responsible For Antarctic Ice Shelf Loss
redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports - Your Universe Online The majority of Antarctica’s ice loss is caused by warm ocean waters eating away at the undersides of ice shelves, not the sudden release and breaking away of ice masses from glaciers...
Latest Glacier Stories
ANN ARBOR, Mich., May 29, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- SNO(TM) glacier water from Iceland, already rated "purest water on the planet," has chalked up yet another third-party certification, this one from the highly-respected National Sanitation Foundation (NSF). SNO (www.iglacierwonders.com) received NSF's certification, symbolizing it has met NSF's stringent compliance standards assuring consumers this product has undergone extensive product testing and analysis, including a complete...
Lawrence LeBlond for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online A Canadian scientist has discovered that certain once-frozen plants have the ability to reawaken after long periods of dormancy, sprouting back to life. The finding came while Catherine La Farge, a researcher with University of Alberta’s Faculty of Science, was observing ancient plants known as bryophytes in the Canadian tundra. Recently exposed terrain left behind by receding glaciers has revealed a startling awakening of these...
Alaska’s melting glaciers remain one of the largest contributors to the world’s rising sea levels, say two University of Alaska Fairbanks geophysicists. UAF Geophysical Institute researchers Anthony Arendt and Regine Hock joined 14 scientists from 10 countries who combined data from field measurements and satellites to get the most complete global picture to date of glacier mass losses and their contribution to rising sea levels. “Sea level change is a pressing societal...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online For decades, researchers have used ancient shorelines to predict the stability of today’s largest ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica. High shoreline markings from three million years ago as Earth was going through a warm period were thought to be evidence of a high sea level due to ice sheet collapse at the time – an assumption that has led many scientists to believe that if the world’s largest ice sheets collapsed in the...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Scientists have known for some time that melting glaciers are contributing to the global sea-level rise. However, the amount being contributed by each region of the planet has never before been calculated with the accuracy of a new study led by researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder and Clark University. Ninety-nine percent of Earth’s land ice is locked up in the Greenland and Antarctica ice sheets. The study,...
WASHINGTON, May 16, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- A new study of glaciers worldwide using observations from two NASA satellites has helped resolve differences in estimates of how fast glaciers are disappearing and contributing to sea level rise. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO) The new research found glaciers outside of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, repositories of 1 percent of all land ice, lost an average of 571 trillion pounds (259...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Climate change impacts on the surface of the Greenland Ice Sheet have been widely studied. An understanding, however, of the key processes in iceberg production has eluded researchers for a long time. A new study, led by the Universite Libre de Bruxelles, presents a sophisticated computer model that provides fresh insight into the impact of climate change on the production of icebergs by Greenland glaciers. The model also demonstrates...
1000-year Antarctic Peninsula climate reconstruction A new 1000-year Antarctic Peninsula climate reconstruction shows that summer ice melting has intensified almost ten-fold, and mostly since the mid 20th Century. Summer ice melt affects the stability of Antarctic ice shelves and glaciers. The research, published this week in the journal Nature Geoscience, adds new knowledge to the international effort that is required to understand the causes of environmental change in Antarctica and...
Brett Smith for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online As the debate over climate change continues, so does the publication of studies that support or challenge the notion that human activity is the main driver of rising temperatures. According to a new study in Nature Geoscience, the dramatic thinning of glaciers in Western Antarctica is due to natural variation, and cannot be attributed directly to carbon emissions. "If we could look back at this region of Antarctica in the 1940s...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online "Go with the flow" has been a standard, if somewhat glib, piece of nearly universally applicable advice for a long time – and never more so than now. Shujie Wang, a geography doctoral student at the University of Cincinnati's McMicken College of Arts & Sciences, recently led a team of researchers who discovered that the best way to monitor the environmental health of the Antarctic is just to go with the flow. The ice flow, that...
Latest Glacier Reference Libraries
Glacier National Park is located in the American state of Montana, south of the Canadian borders of British Columbia and Alberta. The park contains one million acres of varying landscape with a wide range of plant and animal life. It holds two mountain ranges, over 130 discovered and named lakes, and 16,000 square miles of protected unspoiled ecosystem known as the Crown of the Continent Ecosystem. The history of human presence in the Glacier National Park area is thought to begin about...
Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve is located in the Alaska panhandle, west of the city of Juneau. The establishment of the park first began in 1925, when Calvin Coolidge signed the bill that would make the Glacier Bay area a national monument. After an expansion occurred in 1978 by President Jimmy Carter, the park increased in size by 523,000 acres under the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA). This act helped expand the park again in 1980, while it was in the...
