![]() ![]() As the edge of the ice moves away from the rim and enters deeper water, it can retreat faster. Warm ocean water is causing the ice sitting along the rim of the bowl to thin and retreat. ![]() The West Antarctic Ice Sheet sits in a bowl-shaped depression in the earth, with the bottom of the ice below sea level. However, this event is not the news! The news is about what’s happening at the bottom of the glaciers of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. The pictures above and below show this crack-the top one is from NASA, the bottom one was taken by an explorer named Forrest McCarthy.īy July 2013, the crack expanded to the point where a slab of ice 720 square kilometers in size broke off and moved into the Amundsen Sea. The crack was 30 kilometers long, 80 meters wide and 60 meters deep. In 2011, scientists working in Antarctica discovered a massive crack across the Pine Island Glacier, a major glacier in the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. To get a sense of how big it is, let’s visit a crack in one of its outlet glaciers. The West Antarctic Ice Sheet contains about 2.2 million cubic kilometers of ice, enough to raise the world’s oceans about 4.8 meters if it all melted. Click on the map to make it bigger, so you can see all these features. The ice gradually flows into floating ice shelves such as the Ross Ice Shelf and Ronne Ice Shelf, and also glaciers that dump ice into the Amundsen Sea. The bed of this ice sheet lies well below sea level. The West Antarctic Ice Sheet is the ice sheet that covers Antarctica on the Western Hemisphere side of the Transantarctic Mountains.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |