Global Warming and Land Ice | |||
Over the past century, sea level has slowly been rising. This is in part due to the addition of water to the oceans through either the melting of or the "calving" off of icebergs from the world's land ice. Many individual mountain glaciers and ice caps are known to have been retreating, contributing to the rising sea levels. It is uncertain, however, whether the world's two major ice sheets-Greenland and Antarctica-have been growing or diminishing. This is of particular importance because of the huge size of these ice sheets, with their great potential for changing sea level. Together, Greenland and Antarctica contain about 75% of the world's fresh water, enough to raise sea level by over 75 meters, if all the ice were returned to the oceans. Measurements of ice elevations are now being made by satellite radar altimeters for a portion of the polar ice sheets, and in the future they will be made by a laser altimeter as part of NASA's Earth Observing System (EOS). The laser altimeter will provide more accurate measurements over a wider area.
The Greenland ice sheet is warmer than the Antarctic ice sheet and as a result, global warming could produce serious melting on Greenland while having less effect in the Antarctic. In the Antarctic, temperatures are far enough below freezing that even with some global warming, temperatures could remain sufficiently cold to prevent extensive surface melting. Where ice sheets extend outward to the ocean, the ice tends to move out over the surrounding water, forming "ice shelves." There is concern that, with global warming, the water under the ice shelves would be warmer and cause them to break up more readily, forming very large icebergs. If the ice shelves of West Antarctica were to break up, this would release more inland ice in an irreversible process, possibly leading to sea level rises of several meters.
Global Warming Detection and Sea Ice
We need to continue to monitor the location and extent of sea ice and its changes seasonally and interannually. We also need additional studies to determine ice thicknesses and reflectivities. This kind of information can be fed into climate models to attempt to simulate future climate conditions. The same information will also serve as a check on models to see if they are properly simulating existing sea-ice amounts and distributions.
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Polar Ice
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