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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Storm-driven ocean swells have triggered the catastrophic disintegration of Antarctic ice shelves in recent decades, according to new research published in Nature today.
Lead author Dr Rob Massom, of the Australian Antarctic Division and the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Cooperative Research Centre, said that reduced sea ice coverage since the late 1980s led to increased exposure of ice shelves on the Antarctic Peninsula to ocean swells, causing them to flex and break. "Sea ice acts as a protective buffer to ice shelves, by dampening destructive ocean swells before they reach the ice shelf edge," Dr Massom said. "But where there is loss of sea ice, storm-generated ocean swells can easily reach the exposed ice shelf, causing the first few kilometres of its outer margin to flex."
"Over time, this flexing enlarges pre-existing fractures until long thin 'sliver' icebergs break away or 'calve' from the shelf front. This is like the 'straw that broke the camel's back', triggering the runaway collapse of large areas of ice shelves weakened by pre-existing fracturing and decades of surface flooding."
Study co-author Dr Luke Bennetts, from the University of Adelaide's School of Mathematical Sciences, said the finding highlights the need for sea ice and ocean waves to be included in ice sheet modelling. This will allow scientists to more accurately forecast the fate of the remaining ice shelves and better predict the contribution of Antarctica's ice sheet to sea level rise, as climate changes. "The contribution of the Antarctic Ice Sheet is currently the greatest source of uncertainty in projections of global mean sea level rise," Dr Bennetts said.
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(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday June 16 2018, @05:55PM (2 children)
What droplets? We are talking about swell here, not about spray.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 16 2018, @06:19PM (1 child)
The droplet size was in reference to the chinese water torture analogy. Droplet size -> swell size/etc. I don't know what other relevant properties there may be regarding swells, but that's why I want a picture of what we are talking about here.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Sunday June 17 2018, @08:33AM
The wiki link that I provided earlier explains that swell sizes of around 50 feet can be generated by wind speeds as low as 92 km/h (57 mph). Such wind speeds are by no means uncommon. It follows that for storms of a long duration at a distance of several thousand miles can generate even larger swells which are capable of causing significant damage. The energy level of the swell can also be amplified by the rising of the sea bed as it approaches land. This is not something that might appear violent to the casual observer but the huge amounts of energy which must be dissipated when the swell meets land - or glacial ice - can have disastrous effects.