Word: icing
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...study that sent tremors through the scientific community last week, that is exactly what seems to be happening in Greenland. Glaciers that flow toward the ocean in the southern half of that enormous frozen island are among the world's fastest moving, and their massive outpouring of ice now contributes fully a sixth of the annual rise in sea level. According to a study in the current issue of Science, they have nearly doubled their rate of flow over the past five years, to about 8 miles a year, dumping icebergs and meltwater into the already rising ocean faster than...
...climate model anticipated that increase, which means that all current predictions about how much sea level could rise--the latest U.N. report estimated it at a half-meter (about 1.5 ft.) by the end of the century--are too low and will have to be revised upward. Greenland's ice cap covers more than 650,000 sq. mi. and in places stands nearly 2 miles thick. "If it all melted or otherwise slid into the ocean, sea level would rise by 20 ft. or so," says Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton. Under conventional global...
What jump-started the glaciers' outflow isn't precisely clear, but scientists point to two likely triggers. The first, says Julian Dowdeswell of the Scott Polar Research Institute at the University of Cambridge, is the breakup of ice "tongues" that reach out into the sea at the glaciers' leading edges. It's likely, he says, that removing that barrier allowed the glaciers to flow more freely. The second is that ice on the glaciers' surfaces has melted at a record rate in two of the past four years. "Some of that water," says Dowdeswell, "presumably percolates down through crevasses," lubricating...
...level that makes the surprising news out of Greenland so disturbing. That is only one more hint that climate change may hinge on tipping points, where relatively small changes in temperature can suddenly cause disproportionately large effects. In Greenland, it's meltwater greasing the way for massive outflows of ice. In Antarctica, which has one ice sheet the size of Greenland's and another nearly 10 times as large, the same sort of leverage could eventually come into play, with even greater consequences. Yet another tipping point could come as ice sheets shrink and the polar caps start absorbing rather...
When Zhang Dan and Zhang Hao took to the ice in the pairs figure-skating final in Torino last week, most Chinese knew the song they skated to by heart. The Offspring of Dragons celebrates the glory of a mighty civilization. "There's a dragon in the ancient East, its name is China," go the folk song's stirring lyrics. By the time the final standings were tallied in the Olympic competition, the Zhangs' choice of music seemed particularly prescient. Although Tatiana Totmianina and Maxim Marinin won the 12th consecutive pairs gold for Russia (or, previously, the Soviet Union...