Synoptic and Mesoscale Climate Forcing on Antarctic Ice Shelf Surface Melt Dynamics

Synoptic and Mesoscale Climate Forcing on Antarctic Ice Shelf Surface Melt Dynamics PDF Author: Christopher Karmosky
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 111

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Synoptic and Mesoscale Climate Forcing on Antarctic Ice Shelf Surface Melt Dynamics

Synoptic and Mesoscale Climate Forcing on Antarctic Ice Shelf Surface Melt Dynamics PDF Author: Christopher Karmosky
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 111

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Book Description


Dynamics of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet

Dynamics of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet PDF Author: C.J. van der Veen
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9400937458
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description
Few scientists doubt the prediction that the antropogenic release of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will lead to some warming of the earth's climate. So there is good reason to investigate the possible effects of such a warming, in dependence of geographical and social economic setting. Many bodies, governmental or not, have organized meetings and issued reports in which the carbon dioxide problem is defined, reviewed, and possible threats assessed. The rate at which such reports are produced still increases. However, while more and more people are getting involved in the 'carbon dioxide business', the number of investigators working on the basic problems grows, in our view, too slowly. Many fundamental questions are still not answered in a satisfactory way, and the carbon dioxide building rests on a few thin pillars. One such fundamental question concerns the change in sea level associated with a climatic warming of a few degrees. A number of processes can be listed that could all lead to changes of the order of tens of centimeters (e. g. thermal expansion, change in mass balance of glaciers and ice sheets). But the picture of the carbon dioxide problem has frequently be made more dramatic by suggesting that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is unstable, implying a certain probability of a 5 m higher sea-level stand within a few centuries.

Melt on Antarctic Ice Shelves

Melt on Antarctic Ice Shelves PDF Author: Andrew Carl Johnson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Ice shelves
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
Melt on the surface and underside of Antarctic ice shelves are important to the mass balance and stability of the ice sheet, and therefore pose significance to global sea levels. Satellite-based passive microwave observations provide daily or near-daily coarse resolution surface observations from 1978 on, and we use this record to identify days in which melt water is present on the ice sheet and ice shelf surfaces, called melt days. There are significant differences in the results of melt detection methods however, and we evaluate four different passive microwave melt detection algorithms. There is a lack of sufficient ground truth observations, so we use Google Earth Engine to build time series of Sentinel-1 Synthetic Aperture Radar images from which we can also detect melt to serve as a comparison dataset. A melt detection method using a Kmeans clustering algorithm developed here is shown to be the most effective on ice shelves, so we further apply this method to quantify melt days across all Antarctica ice shelves for every year from 1979/80 to 2019/20. The highest sums of melt days occur on the Antarctic Peninsula at 89 melt days per year, and we find few linear trends in the annual melt days on ice shelves around the continent. The primary mode of spatial variability in the melt day dataset is closely related to the Southern Annular Mode, a climate index for the southward migration of Southern Westerly Winds, which has been increasing in recent decades. Positive Southern Annular Mode index values are associated with decreased melt days in some regions of Antarctica. We also present a novel application of passive microwave analysis to detect changes in firn structure due to unusually large melt events in some regions and we show how this method detects ice lens formation and grain growth on specific ice shelves. To study the impacts of subshelf melt we focus on the Filchner-Ronne region of Antarctica, which contains the second largest ice shelf on the continent. We performed an ensemble of ice sheet model runs for a set of ocean warming scenarios. Each ensemble used a realistic range of physical parameters to control ice dynamics and sliding, generated by a Bayesian analysis of a surrogate model and observed velocities. Increased ocean temperatures were associated with increased mass loss, and by the year 2100 this region contributed 14 mm to sea level per degree of ocean warming at depth between +0°C and +4°C of ocean potential temperature. Beyond +4°C, the rate mass loss increased substantially. This mass loss corresponded to grounding line retreat across the region.

Antarctic Climate Evolution

Antarctic Climate Evolution PDF Author: Fabio Florindo
Publisher: Elsevier
ISBN: 0128191104
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 806

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Book Description
Antarctic Climate Evolution, Second Edition, enhances our understanding of the history of the world's largest ice sheet, and how it responded to and influenced climate change during the Cenozoic. It includes terrestrial and marine geology, sedimentology, glacier geophysics and ship-borne geophysics, coupled with results from numerical ice sheet and climate modeling. The book's content largely mirrors the structure of the Past Antarctic Ice Sheets (PAIS) program (www.scar.org/science/pais), formed to investigate past changes in Antarctica by supporting multidisciplinary global research. This new edition reflects recent advances and is updated with several new chapters, including those covering marine and terrestrial life changes, ice shelves, advances in numerical modeling, and increasing coverage of rates of change. The approach of the PAIS program has led to substantial improvement in our knowledge base of past Antarctic change and our understanding of the factors that have guided its evolution. - Offers an overview of Antarctic climate change, analyzing historical, present-day and future developments - Provides the latest information on subjects ranging from terrestrial and marine geology to sedimentology and glacier geophysics in the context of Antarctic evolution - Fully updated to include expanded coverage of rates of change, advances in numerical modeling, marine and terrestrial life changes, ice shelves, and more

Ice in the Climate System

Ice in the Climate System PDF Author: W. Richard Peltier
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 3642850162
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 627

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Book Description
According to my latest model for the last glacial maximum (LGM) (Grosswald 1988), the Arctic continental margin of Eurasia was glaciated by the Eurasian ice sheet, which consisted of three interconnected ice domes --the Scandinavian, Kara, and East Siberian. The Kara Sea glacier was largely a marine ice dome grounded on the sea's continental shelf. The ice dome discharged its ice in all directions, northward into the deep Arctic Basin, southward and westward onto the mainland of west-central North Siberia, the northern Russian Plain, and over the Barents shelf into the Norwegian-Greenland Sea On the Barents shelf, the Kara ice dome merged with the Scandinavian ice dome. In the Arctic Basin the discharged ice floated and eventually coalesced with the floating glacier ice of the North-American provenance giving rise to the Central-Arctic ice shelf. Along its southern margin, the Kara ice dome impounded the northward flowing rivers, causing the formation of large proglaciallakes and their integration into a transcontinental meltwater drainage system. Despite the constant increase in corroborating evidence, the concept of a Kara ice dome is still considered debatable, and the ice dome itself problematic. As a result, a paleogeographic uncertainty takes place, which is aggravated by the fact that a great deal of existing knowledge, no matter how broadly accepted, is based on ambiguous interpretations of the data, most of which are published in Russian and, therefore, not easily available to western scientists.

Polar Environments and Global Change

Polar Environments and Global Change PDF Author: Roger G. Barry
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108423167
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 445

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Book Description
Surveys atmospheric, oceanic and cryospheric processes, present and past conditions, and changes in polar environments.

Climate Change in the Polar Regions

Climate Change in the Polar Regions PDF Author: John Turner
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107377099
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 449

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Book Description
The polar regions have experienced some remarkable environmental changes in recent decades, such as the Antarctic ozone hole, the loss of large amounts of sea ice from the Arctic Ocean and major warming on the Antarctic Peninsula. The polar regions are also predicted to warm more than any other region on Earth over the next century if greenhouse gas concentrations continue to rise. Yet trying to separate natural climate variability from anthropogenic factors still presents many problems. This book presents a thorough review of how the polar climates have changed over the last million years and sets recent changes within a long term perspective. The approach taken is highly cross-disciplinary and the close links between the atmosphere, ocean and ice at high latitudes are stressed. The volume will be invaluable for researchers and advanced students in polar science, climatology, global change, meteorology, oceanography and glaciology.

Assessing Controls on Ice Dynamics at Crane Glacier, Antarctic Peninsula Using a Numerical Ice Flow Model

Assessing Controls on Ice Dynamics at Crane Glacier, Antarctic Peninsula Using a Numerical Ice Flow Model PDF Author: Rainey Aberle
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Climatic changes
Languages : en
Pages : 59

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Book Description
"The widespread retreat of glaciers and the collapse of ice shelves along the Antarctic Peninsula has been attributed to atmospheric and oceanic warming, which promotes mass loss. However, several glaciers on the eastern peninsula that were buttressed by the Larsen A and B ice shelves prior to collapse in 1995 and 2002, respectively, have been advancing in recent years. This asymmetric pattern of rapid retreat and long-term re-advance is similar to the tidewater glacier cycle, which can occur largely independent of climate forcing. Here, I use a width- and depth-integrated numerical ice flow model to investigate glacier response to ice shelf collapse and the influence of changing climate conditions at Crane Glacier, formerly a tributary of the Larsen B ice shelf, over the last ~10 years. Sensitivity tests to explore the influence of perturbations in surface mass balance and submarine melt (up to 10 m a−1) and fresh water impounded in crevasses (up to 10 m) on glacier dynamics reveal that by 2100, the modeled mass discharge ranges from 0.53-98 Gt a−1, with the most substantial changes due to surface melt-induced thinning. My findings suggest that the growth of a floating ice tongue can hinder enhanced flow, allowing the grounding zone to remain steady for many decades, analogous to the advancing stage of the tidewater glacier cycle. Additionally, former tributary glaciers can take several decades to geometrically adjust to ice shelf collapse at their terminal boundary while elevated glacier discharge persists."--Boise State University ScholarWorks.

Polar Ice and Global Warming in Cryosphere Regions

Polar Ice and Global Warming in Cryosphere Regions PDF Author: Neloy Khare
Publisher: CRC Press
ISBN: 1003811949
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
Polar Ice and Global Warming in Cryosphere Regions is based on recent and past climate variabilities data gathered through satellites and spatial-temporal analysis to explain the role of global warming on cryosphere regions such as high-latitude Himalaya, Arctic and Antarctic regions, and the surrounding Southern Ocean and Arctic Ocean. Through several case studies the book describes the atmospheric processes and their interactions with high-latitude regions toward a better understanding of climate variability. Understanding cryosphere regions helps readers develop plausible models for disaster risk management and policy on different polar events. Features Presents a thorough review on climate variability over the Southern Ocean and Antarctica, and the impact of climate variability and global warming on cryosphere regions Explains how the inferred climatological environmental conditions using natural archives may shed light on climate scenarios in cryosphere regions Includes case studies on globally connected geoscientific phenomena in the Himalayan, Arctic, and Antarctic regions Discusses the use of natural archives to explain the current climate scenario in the cryosphere regions Intended for researchers, academics, and graduate students following oceanography, meteorology, or environmental studies, and those working on projects related to climate change in governmental organizations, institutions, and global NGOs, this book outlines ways in which readers can initiate plans and policies to help mitigate the effects of global warming in these regions.

Introduction to the Physics of the Cryosphere

Introduction to the Physics of the Cryosphere PDF Author: Melody Sandells
Publisher: Morgan & Claypool Publishers
ISBN: 1627053034
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 88

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Book Description
The cryosphere encompasses all regions of the planet that experiences water in ice form for some portion of the year. In this book, authors Melody Sandells and Daniela Flocco deliver an introduction to the physics of the cryosphere. This includes the Arcti