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The Antarctic ice sheet is a continental glacier covering 98% of the Antarctic continent, with an area of 14 million square kilometres (5.4 million square miles) and an average thickness of over 2 kilometres (1.2 mi). It is the largest of Earth's two current ice sheets, containing 26.5 million cubic kilometres (6,400,000 cubic miles) of ice ...
The Thwaites Glacier Tongue, or Western Glacier Tongue (75°0′S 106°50′W) was a narrow, floating part of the glacier, located about 30 mi (48 km) east of Mount Murphy. [28] It was the first part of the glacier to be mapped, [1] based on 65,000 aerial photographs collected during Operation Highjump in 1947. Back then, it was about 95 km (59 ...
The West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) is the segment of the continental ice sheet that covers West Antarctica, the portion of Antarctica on the side of the Transantarctic Mountains that lies in the Western Hemisphere. It is classified as a marine-based ice sheet, meaning that its bed lies well below sea level and its edges flow into floating ice ...
ICESat-2 (Ice, Cloud, and Land Elevation Satellite 2), part of NASA 's Earth Observing System, is a satellite mission for measuring ice sheet elevation and sea ice thickness, as well as land topography, vegetation characteristics, and clouds. [9] ICESat-2, a follow-on to the ICESat mission, was launched on 15 September 2018 onboard Delta II as ...
Location and diagram of Lake Vostok, a prominent subglacial lake beneath the East Antarctic Ice Sheet.. East Antarctic Ice Sheet is located directly above the East Antarctic Shield – a craton (stable area of the Earth's crust) with the area of 10,200,000 km 2 (3,900,000 sq mi), which accounts for around 73% of the entire Antarctic landmass. [19]
The Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers are two of Antarctica's five largest ice streams.Scientists have found that the flow of these ice streams has accelerated in recent years, and suggested that if they were to melt, global sea levels would rise by 1 to 2 m (3 ft 3 in to 6 ft 7 in), destabilising the entire West Antarctic Ice Sheet and perhaps sections of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet.
A JPL analysis published in 2022 found that thinning and crumbling away of Antarctica's ice shelf had reduced its mass by some 12 trillion tons since 1997, double previous estimates.
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.