Ice sheet
An ice sheet is a large mass of glacier ice that covers an area of more than 50,000 square kilometres (19,000 sq mi).[2] It may also be called a continental glacier.[3] Currently, there are two ice sheets in the world: the Antarctic ice sheet and the Greenland ice sheet. Ice sheets are larger than ice shelves or alpine glaciers. Masses of ice covering less than 50,000 km2 are called ice caps. The ice in an ice cap usually comes from a series of glaciers that drain into it.
Although the surface is cold, the base of a sheet of ice is lukewarm because of the global warming. In places, melting occurs and the melting water lubricates the ice sheet. There are channels inside the ice sheet, these are ice streams.
In other timelines, there we're other ice sheets: During the Ice Age, the Laurentide ice sheet covered much of North America, the Patagonian ice sheet covered much of the Patagonia region in South America and the Scandinavian ice sheet covered much of Scandinavia in Europe
The Antarctic ice sheet is the largest single mass of ice on Earth. It covers an area of almost 14 million km2 and contains 30 million km3 of ice. Around 90% of the fresh water on the Earth's surface is held in this ice sheet. If all of it were to melt, it would cause sea levels to rise by 58 metres.[4] The ice sheet first formed in the early Oligocene. It retreated and advanced many times until the Pliocene, when it came to occupy almost all of Antarctica.
The Greenland ice sheet covers about 82% of the surface of Greenland, a part of Denmark. Satellite images from NASA show that it is melting at a rate of about 239 cubic kilometres (57.3 cubic miles) each year.[5][6] If all of it melted, it would cause sea levels to rise by 7.2 metres.[4] The ice sheet did not develop at all until the late Pliocene, but apparently developed very quickly. This had the unusual effect of allowing fossils of plants that once grew on present-day Greenland to be much better preserved than with the slowly forming Antarctic ice sheet.
References change
- ↑ The map of Greenland is not on the same scale as the map of Antarctica; Greenland's area is approximately 15% of Antarctica's.
- ↑ "Glossary of Important Terms in Glacial Geology". Archived from the original on 2006-08-29. Retrieved 2006-08-22.
- ↑ "American Meteorological Society, Glossary of Meteorology". Archived from the original on 2012-06-23. Retrieved 2013-10-17.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 Some physical characteristics of ice on Earth Archived 2007-12-16 at the Wayback Machine, Climate Change 2001: Working Group I: The Scientific Basis. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
- ↑ Rasmus Benestad et al.: The Greenland Ice. Realclimate.org 2006
- ↑ Greenland melt 'speeding up', BBC News, 11 August 2006