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The Earth's crust is depressed by the product of thickness of ice and the ratio of ice and mantle densities. This large ice load results in elastic deformation of the entire lithospheric mantle over the span of 10,000-100,000 years, with the load eventually supported by the lithosphere after the limit of local isostatic depression has been ...
Most lakes in the world occupy basins scoured out by glaciers. Glacial motion can be fast (up to 30 metres per day (98 ft/d), observed on Jakobshavn Isbræ in Greenland) [1] or slow (0.5 metres per year (20 in/year) on small glaciers or in the center of ice sheets), but is typically around 25 centimetres per day (9.8 in/d). [2]
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.
The enormous weight of this ice caused the surface of the Earth's crust to deform and warp downward, forcing the viscoelastic mantle material to flow away from the loaded region. At the end of each glacial period when the glaciers retreated, the removal of this weight led to slow (and still ongoing) uplift or rebound of the land and the return ...
A glacier (US: / ˈ ɡ l eɪ ʃ ər /; UK: / ˈ ɡ l æ s i ə / or / ˈ ɡ l eɪ s i ə /) is a persistent body of dense ice, a form of rock, [2] that is constantly moving downhill under its own weight. A glacier forms where the accumulation of snow exceeds its ablation over many years, often centuries.
[4] [5] [6] As ice sheets expand over the ocean, they become ice shelves. [6] Ice sheets contain 99% of all the freshwater ice found on Earth, and form as layers of snowfall accumulate and slowly start to compact into ice. [5] There are only two ice sheets present on Earth today: the Antarctic ice sheet and the Greenland ice sheet.
A Swiss Academy of Sciences panel is reporting a dramatic acceleration of glacier melt in the Alpine country, which has lost 10% of its ice volume in just two years after high summer heat and low ...
Although Earth is a dynamic system that responds to loads in many different ways, [3] isostasy describes the important limiting case in which crust and mantle are in static equilibrium. Certain areas (such as the Himalayas and other convergent margins) are not in isostatic equilibrium and are not well described by isostatic models.