A letter to Nature published today a letter from a few...
Category: Antarctic ice sheet
A letter to Nature published today a letter from a few cryosphere experts (they know their ice) in Boulder at the Univ. of Colorado and the Nat'l Center for Atmosphere Research. It's mainly a celebration of the growing ability to measure with great precision the integrated impacts of small changes scattered around the globe. Most important, the two GRACE satellites (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) give continuously-updated snapshots of how much ice is locked in glaciers at mid-latitudes, in big ice caps and ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctic, and so on. The result: melting ice is raising sea level just like we thought. But more of it is from the big ice sheets and less from mountain glaciers including on the Tibetan...
And the icemelt goes on.
In...
And the icemelt goes on.
In Geophysical Research Letters a man who works at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab and at UC Irvine (and his colleagues at NCAR and in the Netherlands) report that satellite and other observations, gathered by two separate techniques of measurement over the last few decades, reveal a markedly quickening loss of mass by the ice sheets of Greenland and of Antarctica. Their shrinking is about to overtake what had been the primary source of cryosphere contribution to rising sea levels, the melting of smaller mountain glaciers and ice caps elsewhere in the world and mostly at lower latitudes. Ergo, they conclude, sea level rise in this century is likely to be at or beyond the top end of the...
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