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During the Late Cenozoic Ice Age, many of those areas had been covered by ice as well. [12] [13] The EAIS rests on a major land mass, but the bed of the WAIS is, in places, more than 2,500 meters (8,200 feet) below sea level. It would be seabed if the ice sheet were not there. The WAIS is classified as a marine-based ice sheet, meaning that its ...
The Antarctic sea ice cover is highly seasonal, with very little ice in the austral summer, expanding to an area roughly equal to that of Antarctica in winter.It peaks (~18 × 10^6 km 2) during September (comparable to the surface area of Pluto), which marks the end of austral winter, and retreats to a minimum (~3 × 10^6 km 2) in February.
The warming of the Southern Ocean around Antarctica has caused the weakening or collapse of ice shelves, which float just offshore of glaciers and stabilize them. Many coastal glaciers have been losing mass and retreating, causing net-annual ice loss across Antarctica, [37]: 1264 although the East Antarctic ice sheet continues to gain ice inland.
The Southern Ocean absorbs the most heat; after 2005, it accounted for between 67% and 98% of all heat entering the oceans. [27] The temperature in the ocean's upper layer in West Antarctica has warmed by 1 °C (1.8 °F) since 1955, and the Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC) is also warming faster than the average. [3]
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]
This can have many implications for the weather in the U.S. Typically, this results in not only a warmer-than-average air mass for the Lower 48, but it can also result in a more active storm track.
According to weather historian Christopher Burt's book "Extreme Weather," extreme lake-effect snows are "normally very fluffy, with snow to water ratios as high as 40 inches of snow to melted ...
The Antarctic continental shelf is a submerged piece of the Antarctic continent that underlies a portion of the Southern Ocean — the ocean which surrounds Antarctica. The shelf is generally narrow and unusually deep, its edge lying at depths averaging 500 meters (the global mean is around 100 meters), with troughs extending as far as 2000 ...