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Over the course of the 19-year survey (1992 – 2011), the average rates of mass balance of the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets were estimated to be -71 ± 53 and -152 ± 49 Gt yr −1, respectively, and the total ice loss equated to a global rise in sea level of 11.1 ± 3.8 mm. [2] Examining the ice sheet regions individually showed that ...
The Greenland ice sheet is an ice sheet which forms the second largest body of ice in the world. It is an average of 1.67 km (1.0 mi) thick, and over 3 km (1.9 mi) thick at its maximum. [ 2 ] It is almost 2,900 kilometres (1,800 mi) long in a north–south direction, with a maximum width of 1,100 kilometres (680 mi) at a latitude of 77°N ...
The Laurentide ice sheet (LIS) was a massive sheet of ice that covered millions of square miles, including most of Canada and a large portion of the Northern United States, multiple times during the Quaternary glaciation epochs, from 2.58 million years ago to the present.
Greenland ice sheet as seen from space. An ice sheet is a body of ice which covers a land area of continental size - meaning that it exceeds 50,000 km 2. [4] The currently existing two ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica have a much greater area than this minimum definition, measuring at 1.7 million km 2 and 14 million km 2, respectively.
During the most recent ice age (at its maximum about 20,000 years ago) the world's sea level was about 130 m lower than today, due to the large amount of sea water that had evaporated and been deposited as snow and ice, mostly in the Laurentide Ice Sheet. Most of this had melted by about 10,000 years ago.
Visualization of the ice and snow covering Earth's northern and southern polar regions Northern Hemisphere permafrost (permanently frozen ground) in purple. The polar regions, also called the frigid zones or polar zones, of Earth are Earth's polar ice caps, the regions of the planet that surround its geographical poles (the North and South Poles), lying within the polar circles.
A map of West Antarctica. The total volume of the entire Antarctic ice sheet is estimated at 26.92 million km 3 (6.46 million cu mi), [2] while the WAIS contains about 2.1 million km 3 (530,000 cu mi) in ice that is above the sea level, and ~1 million km 3 (240,000 cu mi) in ice that is below it. [20]
Study of the geology of Antarctica is hampered by the widespread ice cover The bedrock topography of Antarctica (with the ice cover digitally removed), critical to understanding the motion of the continental ice sheets Antarctica without its ice cover. This map does not consider that sea level would rise because of the melted ice, or that the ...