Amundsen Sea glaciers lost weight throughout the period 1992-2013. Scientists have calculated two i

Tidewater glaciers Amundsen Sea, the so-called. "Soft underbelly" of Antarctica destoner machine are losing mass faster and faster. Significant acceleration of this process, however, surprised researchers at the University of California - Irvine (UCI) and NASA, who analyzed the mass balance of the area for over 20 years. The work has just been published in Geophysical Research Letters.
Amundsen Sea region, including the famous Glacier Pine Island Glacier, is a particularly sensitive area of the Antarctic ice sheet and the largest shareholder of the growth in global sea level. Climate change and ocean forcing the glacial streams in the dynamics of internal changes, making the flow faster. Flow into the sea, where they break off from the end faces of standing water a powerful icebergs - the more intense, the larger the flow rate. A specific shape of the substrate under the glaciers of the region destoner machine makes now they entered a phase of the inevitable, virtuous destoner machine decay. Now it turned out that the acceleration of the pace has been multiplied in just two decades.
Detailed analysis of the 21-year series of measurements was based until four independent methods destoner machine of mass balance studies. The study used: laser altimetric (ICESat and IceBridge), altimetric radar (Envisat), gravimetry (GRACE), and mass balance modeling (RACMO2.3). The oldest dates back to 1992 data, the most recent are from 2013. The scope of measurement sequences were different, but common to all of the techniques was the period from 2003 to 2009, which was used to verify that the methods give similar results. The main author of the article, destoner machine Tyler Sutterley the UCI, said: "Previous studies have suggested that the region began to change dramatically in the 1990s and wanted to see to what extent comparable with each other are different measurement techniques. Exceptional compatibility between them convinced us that we're right in the calculation. "
Amundsen Sea glaciers lost weight throughout the period 1992-2013. Scientists have calculated two indices - total loss and its rate of acceleration. Acceleration of weight loss during the years 1992-2013 amounted to an average of 6 Gt / year 2, but in 2003-2009 reached up to 16 Gt / year 2. This meant that at the beginning of the period the mass balance of the study area was at approx. -20 Gigatons / year (Gt / year, 20 billion tons of weight loss per year), and in recent years has exceeded -150 Gt / year. If it averaged for the entire destoner machine period 1992-2013, the "soft underbelly" limited the ice sheet about 83 Gt per year. That's a lot, and in subsequent years the rate of weight loss will be even greater. This seems to confirm earlier predictions, destoner machine supposedly western Antarctica was inevitably fall apart.
The researchers point out that the behavior of ice sheets destoner machine contends that the long-term projections of sea level a lot of uncertainty. Not so long ago glacjolodzy had no idea that the mass balance of Antarctica is positive or negative, because it was not possible to measure it for such a huge and extremely difficult area. It was not until the recent advances in technology allowed them to detail the dynamic changes in Antarctica and Greenland. These modern data caused much surprise that many of the chapters of textbooks for glaciology had to be rewritten. Therefore, our knowledge of the world's largest ice masses is still full of holes, and so far we are not quite able to predict how ice sheets behave under changing environmental conditions the next decades and centuries. Sources: Tyler C. Sutterley, Isabella Velicogna, Eric Rignot, Jeremie Mouginot, Thomas Flament, Michiel van den Broeke R., Jan M. van Wessem, Carleen H. Reijmer. Mass loss of the Amundsen Sea embayment of West Antarctica from four independent techniques. Geophysical Research Letters, 2014; DOI: 10.1002 / 2014GL061940 http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/12/141202183313.htm destoner machine
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