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!
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!
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 …
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 …
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.
How much ice is there in Antarctica? And if it were to melt, how much would global sea levels rise, and how quickly?
The Arctic’s sea ice extent reached an all-time low in September 2012, with the smallest recorded extent since satellite observations began. At 3.42 million square kilometres, it may still sound large, but this small extent of Arctic sea ice could have profound long-term consequences, and it follows a long trend of low sea ice conditions. …