Science highlights of 2013
As the 2013 year draws to a close, I thought it would be great to highlight some of our most important science discoveries in Antarctic Glaciology. Enjoy!
New Papers
My take on exciting new papers that have just been published.
Sea level rise over the next 2000 years
A new paper by Levermann et al. in PNAS uses the record of past rates of sea level rise from palaeo archives and numerical computer models to understand how much sea level rise we can expect per degree of warming in the future. These data suggest that we can expect a global sea level rise …
Patagonian Ice Sheet thinning during a changing climate
J.Boex, C. Fogwill, S. Harrison, N.F. Glasser, A. Hein, C. Schnabel and S. Xu. Rapid thinning of the Late Pleistocene Patagonian Ice Sheet followed migration of the Southern Westerlies. Scientific Reports 3: 2118, p. 1-6 Download the PDF The Patagonian Ice Sheet This recent open-access paper in the new journal Science Communications, which is part …
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Antarctic ice shelves – the hidden villain
Sea ice and ice shelves What is sea ice? Sea ice is frozen sea water; it perennially expands and contracts during each year’s winter and summer. Amongst the sea ice are icebergs calved from tidewater glaciers and ice shelves. Melting sea ice does not contribute directly to sea level rise (ice floats and displaces the …
Future sea level rise from ice sheets
A new paper in Nature Climate Change by Bamber and Aspinall attempts to untangle the thorny problem of how quickly and how much the ice sheets of the world will melt. The rate at which ice sheets melt is difficult to understand, because there are many processes that occur.
Antarctica’s contribution to global sea level rise
How much ice is there in Antarctica? And if it were to melt, how much would global sea levels rise, and how quickly?
Holocene climate and ice-shelf history on James Ross Island
A paper in this weeks’ Nature by Mulvaney et al. 2012 suggested that the climate around the Antarctic Peninsula has varied extensively over the Holocene. This data is derived from a 363.9 m ice core from the Mount Haddington Ice Cap on James Ross Island.