Word: shelfful
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Within the past year, scientists watched in awe as a giant ice shelf disintegrated in the Antarctic Peninsula in just over one month's time, and in a remote region of West Antarctica, satellites have detected an expanse where glaciers are worrisomely speeding up their transport...
ICEMARE: ROSS ICE SHELF...
Sooner or later the big bergs will move off and break up. What they will leave behind is a vague sense of menace. For the parent of the big bergs, the Ross Ice Shelf, is a floating extension of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which, for the past 10,000 years, has been slowly slipping into the sea. Should that ice sheet start a more rapid slide, it would trigger a lot more havoc than a few hulking icebergs...
...weight it is ever so slowly sliding downhill. Because of variations in underlying terrain, however, its slide is not uniform. In the Ross Sea sector, for example, ice is most efficiently conveyed out of the ice sheet's interior by ice streams, which spill onto the Ross Ice Shelf like frozen rivers...
Finally, there is the question of the stability of the Ross Ice Shelf itself. Ice shelves, it turns out, are important to ice sheets for a number of reasons. Among other things, they serve as buffers against currents and wave action and as buttresses that provide structural support. In fact, the absence of ice shelves may be the reason that glaciers in the remote Amundsen Sea sector of West Antarctica are speeding up their transport of ice to the sea. Earlier this year, in the Antarctic Peninsula, the Larsen B ice shelf showed what can happen when conditions warm. First...