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Within the Quaternary ice age, there were also periodic fluctuations of the total volume of land ice, the sea level, and global temperatures. During the colder episodes (referred to as glacial periods or glacials) large ice sheets at least 4 km (2.5 mi) thick at their maximum covered parts of Europe, North America, and Siberia.
The peak flow of the floods is estimated to be 27 cubic kilometers per hour (6.5 cubic miles per hour). [2] The maximum flow speed approached 36 meters/second (130 km/h or 80 mph). [ 3 ] Up to 1.9×10 19 joules of potential energy were released by each flood (the equivalent of 4,500 megatons of TNT ).
The Antarctic ice sheet covers an area of almost 14 million square kilometres (5.4 million square miles) and contains 26.5 million cubic kilometres (6,400,000 cubic miles) of ice. [6] A cubic kilometer of ice weighs approximately 0.92 metric gigatonnes, meaning that the ice sheet weighs about 24,380,000 gigatonnes. This ice is equivalent to ...
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.
Even in 1993, Greenland's melt resulted in 300 cubic kilometers of fresh meltwater entering the seas annually, which was substantially larger than the liquid meltwater input from the Antarctic ice sheet, and equivalent to 0.7% of freshwater entering the oceans from all of the world's rivers. [149]
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]
The Columbia Icefield is the largest ice field in North America's Rocky Mountains. [1] Located within the Canadian Rocky Mountains astride the Continental Divide along the border of British Columbia and Alberta, Canada, the ice field lies partly in the northwestern tip of Banff National Park and partly in the southern end of Jasper National Park.
In the best case scenario, under SSP1-2.6 with no ice sheet acceleration after 2100, the estimate was only 0.8–2.0 metres (2.6–6.6 ft). In the worst estimated scenario, SSP-8.5 with ice cliff instability, the projected range for total sea level rise was 9.5–16.2 metres (31–53 ft) by the year 2300.