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Most comprehensive projections for West Antarctica’s future revealed
http://www.egu.eu/news/188/most-comprehensive-projections-for-west-antarcticas-future-revealed/[font face=Serif][font size=5]Press Release: Most comprehensive projections for West Antarctica’s future revealed[/font]
18 August 2015
[font size=4]A new international study is the first to use a high-resolution, large-scale computer model to estimate how much ice the West Antarctic Ice Sheet could lose over the next couple of centuries, and how much that could add to sea-level rise. The results paint a clearer picture of West Antarctica’s future than was previously possible. The study is published today (18 August) in The Cryosphere, an open access journal of the European Geosciences Union (EGU).[/font]
[font size=3]“The IPCC’s [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] 4[small]th[/small] and 5[small]th[/small] Assessment Reports both note that the acceleration of West Antarctic ice streams in response to ocean warming could result in a major contribution to sea-level rise, but that models were unable to satisfactorily quantify that response,” says Stephen Cornford, a research assistant at the University of Bristol, UK and lead-author of the study.
“The novel aspect of our work is the use of a high-resolution ice-sheet model over a larger area and longer time-scale than previously attempted. Much like a higher-resolution digital camera transforms a blur into a flock of birds, higher resolution in a computer model often helps to capture details of the physics involved which may be crucial to the broad picture,” says co-author Dan Martin from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, US.
West Antarctica is one of the fastest warming regions on Earth and its ice sheet has been stage to dramatic thinning in recent years. The West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) is out of balance because it is losing significant amounts of ice to the ocean, with the losses not being offset by snowfall. The lost ice, drained by the ice sheet’s several ice streams, amounts to a significant contribution to sea-level rise, which is expected to increase in the future.
…[/font][/font]
18 August 2015
Retreat in the Amundsen Sea Embayment in 2154 (Credit: Cornford et al., The Cryosphere, 2015)
[font size=4]A new international study is the first to use a high-resolution, large-scale computer model to estimate how much ice the West Antarctic Ice Sheet could lose over the next couple of centuries, and how much that could add to sea-level rise. The results paint a clearer picture of West Antarctica’s future than was previously possible. The study is published today (18 August) in The Cryosphere, an open access journal of the European Geosciences Union (EGU).[/font]
[font size=3]“The IPCC’s [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] 4[small]th[/small] and 5[small]th[/small] Assessment Reports both note that the acceleration of West Antarctic ice streams in response to ocean warming could result in a major contribution to sea-level rise, but that models were unable to satisfactorily quantify that response,” says Stephen Cornford, a research assistant at the University of Bristol, UK and lead-author of the study.
“The novel aspect of our work is the use of a high-resolution ice-sheet model over a larger area and longer time-scale than previously attempted. Much like a higher-resolution digital camera transforms a blur into a flock of birds, higher resolution in a computer model often helps to capture details of the physics involved which may be crucial to the broad picture,” says co-author Dan Martin from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, US.
West Antarctica is one of the fastest warming regions on Earth and its ice sheet has been stage to dramatic thinning in recent years. The West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) is out of balance because it is losing significant amounts of ice to the ocean, with the losses not being offset by snowfall. The lost ice, drained by the ice sheet’s several ice streams, amounts to a significant contribution to sea-level rise, which is expected to increase in the future.
…[/font][/font]
