This rate is even faster, surpassing what scientists previously thought were the maximum speed limits for ice sheet retreat.
According to to study A recent report published April 5 in the journal Nature found that ice sheets could retreat up to 600 meters per day during a warming climate, 20 times faster than the highest rate of retreat previously measured.
The rate is even faster, surpassing scientists’ previously high speed limits for ice sheet retreat, which could shed light on how quickly ice in Greenland and Antarctica is melting and raising sea levels around the world. In global warming, temp.
The snow in the north is melting fast
To assess the contribution of glaciers and glaciers to global sea level rise, researchers track rates of ice sheet retreat. The monitoring concluded that Antarctica and Greenland together have lost 6.4 trillion tons of ice since the 1990s, leading to a rise in global sea level of at least 17.8 mm, meaning that the two ice sheets in the two aforementioned regions account for more than a third of total sea level rise.
The study’s lead author, Christine Batchelor, professor of physical geography at the University of Newcastle, noted that the rapid retreat of the Eurasian ice sheet is much faster than the fastest-moving glaciers studied in Antarctica.
Batchelor said – in an emailed statement to Al-Jazeera Net – that the continued steady rise in air and sea temperatures will make ice a thing of the past, but the matter will turn into flash avalanches in a very short time. In time, newly formed glaciers will be the first victims.
The authors examined the past layers of two large glaciers in the Norwegian continental ice sheet between 15,000 and 19,000 years ago, and used high-resolution images of the seafloor to reveal how quickly it spread away from Norway. About 20 years ago, a thousand years ago, the ice age retreated. The team calculated rates of retreat by studying the waveform patterns of ice ridges on the sea floor.
A warning from the past
The team found that retreat rates ranged from about 55 meters to 609 meters per day, with maximum retreat rates lasting days to months. According to the researcher, if there is 600 meters of snow per day for a year, there will be no ice in the future.
In the past, one of the fastest retreat rates ever found for glaciers was at Albaba Glacier in West Antarctica, a small glacier very close to the massive Thwaites Glacier, nicknamed the “Resurrection Glacier” because of its large melting contribution to sea-level rise.
In 2017, the Albaba glacier retreated at a rate of about 32 meters per day, according to satellite calculations. For press release Published on EurekAlert.
Batchelor said the new study offers caution considering past lessons about the speed at which ice sheets can retreat. The results show that the rapid declines will be much faster than anything we’ve seen so far.
The authors note that information about how ice sheets have behaved in the past under a warming climate is important to inform computer simulations that predict future ice sheet and sea level change.
The study shows the value of obtaining high-resolution images of preserved ice landscapes on the seafloor.
“Award-winning beer geek. Extreme coffeeaholic. Introvert. Avid travel specialist. Hipster-friendly communicator.”
