Nature & Environment
Greenland's Disappearing Glaciers Explained by New Landscapes
Thomas Carannante
First Posted: Feb 04, 2014 02:09 PM EST
Melting ice sheets in Canada have left behind landscapes that may provide more information concerning Greenland's shrinking glaciers. A new study seeks to find these answers through examination of the Laurentide Ice Sheet.
The Laurentide Ice Sheet is a massive ice cap that covered all of Canada and parts of the northern U.S. about 15,000 years ago. When the ice sheet began to melt, it left behind eskers. Eskers are the sinuous, gravelly remains of streams and rivers that flowed beneath the ice of the Arctic regions. A new study revealed that examining these features could help forecast the future of Greenland's changing ice sheet.
Robert Storrar is a geomorphologist at Durham University in the UK and the lead author of this study. He believed concrete answers can be found if he and his team could determine what happens to the sapphire-blue meltwater that appears on the top of the Greenland ice each summer. They wanted to figure out how the water flows, where the water flows and if it's causing a rise in the sea level. Storrar believed that these answers could be found in Canada's eskers.
Eskers have been appearing more frequently as the ice glaciers have melted. The esker, a fossilized river or stream filled with sand, gravel, and rocks, usually forms within or under glaciers. Eskers are created when the water flowing beneath the glacier melts upward into the ice, the sediments (sand, gravek, and rocks) piles up into a ridge, thus contributing to a landscape as a whole.
The increase of eskers in the Northern Hemisphere (especially in Canada) has suggested there has been an increase in temperature, which is providing answers for the disappearing and shrinking glaciers in Greenland. Additionally, by matching esker patterns to the timing of ice sheet retreat, the study may have unearthed that the meltwater underneath the ice sheets is organized into channels, suggesting that meltwater rivers and streams may be running underneath the "mysterious" middle of Greenland's Ice Sheet.
To read more about this study, visit this Live Science article.
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First Posted: Feb 04, 2014 02:09 PM EST
Melting ice sheets in Canada have left behind landscapes that may provide more information concerning Greenland's shrinking glaciers. A new study seeks to find these answers through examination of the Laurentide Ice Sheet.
The Laurentide Ice Sheet is a massive ice cap that covered all of Canada and parts of the northern U.S. about 15,000 years ago. When the ice sheet began to melt, it left behind eskers. Eskers are the sinuous, gravelly remains of streams and rivers that flowed beneath the ice of the Arctic regions. A new study revealed that examining these features could help forecast the future of Greenland's changing ice sheet.
Robert Storrar is a geomorphologist at Durham University in the UK and the lead author of this study. He believed concrete answers can be found if he and his team could determine what happens to the sapphire-blue meltwater that appears on the top of the Greenland ice each summer. They wanted to figure out how the water flows, where the water flows and if it's causing a rise in the sea level. Storrar believed that these answers could be found in Canada's eskers.
Eskers have been appearing more frequently as the ice glaciers have melted. The esker, a fossilized river or stream filled with sand, gravel, and rocks, usually forms within or under glaciers. Eskers are created when the water flowing beneath the glacier melts upward into the ice, the sediments (sand, gravek, and rocks) piles up into a ridge, thus contributing to a landscape as a whole.
The increase of eskers in the Northern Hemisphere (especially in Canada) has suggested there has been an increase in temperature, which is providing answers for the disappearing and shrinking glaciers in Greenland. Additionally, by matching esker patterns to the timing of ice sheet retreat, the study may have unearthed that the meltwater underneath the ice sheets is organized into channels, suggesting that meltwater rivers and streams may be running underneath the "mysterious" middle of Greenland's Ice Sheet.
To read more about this study, visit this Live Science article.
See Now: NASA's Juno Spacecraft's Rendezvous With Jupiter's Mammoth Cyclone