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Ice caps accumulate snow on their upper surfaces, and ablate snow on their lower surfaces. [6] An ice cap in equilibrium accumulates and ablates snow at the same rate. The AAR is the ratio between the accumulation area and the total area of the ice cap, which is used to indicate the health of the glacier. [6]
In ice sheets, domes may reach a thickness that may exceed 3,000 meters (9,800 feet). However, in ice caps, the thickness of the dome is much smaller, measuring roughly up to several hundred metres in comparison. [5] In glaciated islands, ice domes are usually the highest point of the ice cap. [5]
A polar ice cap or polar cap is a high-latitude region of a planet, dwarf planet, or natural satellite that is covered in ice. [ 1 ] There are no requirements with respect to size or composition for a body of ice to be termed a polar ice cap, nor any geological requirement for it to be over land, but only that it must be a body of solid phase ...
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 loss of this ice sheet would take between 2,000 and 13,000 years, [59] [60] although several centuries of high greenhouse emissions could shorten this time to 500 years. [61] A sea-level rise of 3.3 m (10 ft 10 in) would occur if the ice sheet collapses, leaving ice caps on the mountains, and 4.3 m (14 ft 1 in) if those ice caps also melt. [62]
Glaciers often form on the edges of ice fields, serving as gravity-propelled drains off the ice field which is in turn replenished by snowfall. While an ice cap is not constrained by topography, an ice field is. An ice field is also distinguishable from an ice cap because it does not have a dome-like form. [2]
The only extant ice sheets are the two that cover most of Antarctica and Greenland. [12] They contain vast quantities of freshwater, enough that if both melted, global sea levels would rise by over 70 m (230 ft). [13] Portions of an ice sheet or cap that extend into water are called ice shelves; they tend to be thin with limited slopes and ...
The ice cap in the north is of a lower altitude (base at −5000 m, top at −2000 m) than the one in the south (base at 1000 m, top at 3500 m). [27] [28] It is also warmer, so all the frozen carbon dioxide disappears each summer. [29] The part of the cap that survives the summer is called the north residual cap and is made of water ice.