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1.
Thomas RH 《Science (New York, N.Y.)》1979,205(4412):1257-1258
Retreat of the margins of the West Antarctic ice sheet associated with rising sea level during the last 15,000 years is the main cause for the thinning of the ice sheet by approximately 300 meters. The West Antarctic ice sheet during the late Wisconsin was at least 30 percent wider than it is today, and Holocene retreat of its margins has added about 6 meters to the world sea level.  相似文献   

2.
It is estimated that 84 percent of the ice exiting the Arctic Basin through Fram Strait during June and July 1984 was multiyear ice and that a large percentage of this ice is ridged or otherwise deformed. While freeboard and thickness data, together with salinity measurements on cores, usually sufficed to distinguish between first and multiyear floes, preliminary identification could usually be made on the basis of snow cover measurements with snow cover being much thicker on multiyear ice. Cores from the top half meter of multiyear floes were generally very much harder and more transparent than cores from first-year floes. Age estimates of multiyear floes, based on petrographic and salinity characteristics of cores, did not exceed 4 to 5 years for any of the floes that were observed exiting Fram Strait.  相似文献   

3.
A summer field survey off Point Barrow, Alaska, revealed that Arctic sea ice develops a growth of phytoplanktonic diatoms. The diatoms are found in a brine solution in microfissures between ice crystals on the underside of the ice. The chlorophyll content of this layer is 100 times more than that of the surrounding sea waters; this has led to a hypothesis that a considerable fraction of the primary production of the Arctic Sea may be carried out in sea ice, especially during the spring and early summer months.  相似文献   

4.
南极普里兹湾关键物理海洋学问题研究进展及未来趋势   总被引:5,自引:2,他引:3  
南极普里兹湾及其邻近海域关键物理海洋学问题包括水团特性、环流特征和冰架 海洋 海冰相互作用过程等。该海域水团可以分为南极表层水、绕极深层水、南极底层水、南极陆架水和南极冰架水等,受外部条件影响,这些水团时空变化显著。普里兹湾区域的环流以普里兹湾流涡,西向的沿岸流和东向的绕极流,以及两者之间的南极辐散带的环流为主要特征,地形是环流特征的关键影响因素。埃默里冰架 海洋的相互作用过程显著影响普里兹湾海域的水团特性和环流状况。冰泵机制,是埃默里冰架外海水进入冰穴,并引起冰架底部消融和冻结的重要原因。冰架 海洋 海冰相互作用形成的低温高盐水,是普里兹湾形成南极底层水的潜在因素之一。加强现场观测,并建立高分辨率的冰架 海洋 海冰耦合模型系统是研究普里兹湾海域物理海洋学关键过程和变化机制的重要手段,是南极研究的发展趋势。  相似文献   

5.
The Phanerozoic record of global sea-level change   总被引:5,自引:0,他引:5  
We review Phanerozoic sea-level changes [543 million years ago (Ma) to the present] on various time scales and present a new sea-level record for the past 100 million years (My). Long-term sea level peaked at 100 +/- 50 meters during the Cretaceous, implying that ocean-crust production rates were much lower than previously inferred. Sea level mirrors oxygen isotope variations, reflecting ice-volume change on the 10(4)- to 10(6)-year scale, but a link between oxygen isotope and sea level on the 10(7)-year scale must be due to temperature changes that we attribute to tectonically controlled carbon dioxide variations. Sea-level change has influenced phytoplankton evolution, ocean chemistry, and the loci of carbonate, organic carbon, and siliciclastic sediment burial. Over the past 100 My, sea-level changes reflect global climate evolution from a time of ephemeral Antarctic ice sheets (100 to 33 Ma), through a time of large ice sheets primarily in Antarctica (33 to 2.5 Ma), to a world with large Antarctic and large, variable Northern Hemisphere ice sheets (2.5 Ma to the present).  相似文献   

6.
Oil and gas deposits in the Alaskan Arctic are estimated to contain up to 40 percent of the remaining undiscovered crude oil and oil-equivalent nature gas within U.S. jurisdiction. Most (65 to 70 percent) of these estimated reserves are believed to occur offshore beneath the shallow, ice-covered seas, of the Alaskan continental shelf. Offshore recovery operations for such areas are far from routine, with the primary problems associated with the presence of ice. Some problems that must be resolved if efficient, cost-effective, environmentally safe, year-round offshore production is to be achieved include the accurate estimation of ice forces on offshore structures, the proper placement of pipelines beneath ice-produced gouges in the sea floor, and the cleanup of oil spills in pack ice areas.  相似文献   

7.
Routine mapping of snow and ice fields in the northern hemisphere was started by NOAA in 1967. Large year-to-year variations of the snow and pack-ice covers were observed. The annual mean coverage increased by 12 percent during 1971 and has remained high. The index R, which shows the approximate amount of energy reflected from the surface by snow and ice under the mean cloudiness, increased correspondingly. Thus, if the cloud cover over the snow fields did not increase substantially, the anomalous weather patterns of 1972 and 1973 could have been connected with the deficit in surface heat exchange which originated in the northern hemisphere the year before. During the past 7 years the largest changes occurred in the fall and in the continental interiors of Asia and America (8). Two synoptic parameters which could readily provide information on the development of snow and ice cover in the northern hemisphere are (i) the total area momentarily covered and (ii) the running annual mean of snow and ice coverage for the preceding 1-year period. By 20 September 1973 the annual mean coverage was 37.3 x 10(6) km(2), 11 to 12 percent higher than at the same time during 1968 through 1970. Snow cover-fall, the season when 15 x 10(6) to 55 x 10(6) km(2) of the northern hemisphere is covered with snow and ice, started on 20 September 1973, compared to 17 September 1972 and 5 or 10 October during 1967 through 1970. The links between the atmosphere, the oceans, and the land surfaces must be better understood before the role of snow and ice can be thoroughly explained and exploited for long-range weather forecasting. But it is clear that snow, hitherto almost overlooked in synoptic meteorological reports, must be important in the mechanism of weather changes.  相似文献   

8.
During the last interglacial, Antarctic climate changed before that of the Northern Hemisphere. Large local changes in precession forcing could have produced this pattern if there were a rectified response in sea ice cover. Results from a coupled sea ice-ocean general circulation model supported this hypothesis when it was tested for three intervals around the last interglacial. Such a mechanism may play an important role in contributing to phase offsets between Northern and Southern Hemisphere climate change for other time intervals.  相似文献   

9.
Antarctic snowfall exhibits substantial variability over a range of time scales, with consequent impacts on global sea level and the mass balance of the ice sheets. To assess how snowfall has affected the thickness of the ice sheets in Antarctica and to provide an extended perspective, we derived a 50-year time series of snowfall accumulation over the continent by combining model simulations and observations primarily from ice cores. There has been no statistically significant change in snowfall since the 1950s, indicating that Antarctic precipitation is not mitigating global sea level rise as expected, despite recent winter warming of the overlying atmosphere.  相似文献   

10.
Planktotrophic larvae that occur beneath the annual sea ice in the Antarctic assimilate organic solutes and preferentially ingest bacteria, whereas they actively exclude phytoplankton. In regions where phytoplankton biomass is temporally limited by light or nutrient concentrations, the growth and development of planktotrophic larvae may not be directly coupled to phytoplankton production.  相似文献   

11.
Global Warming and Northern Hemisphere Sea Ice Extent   总被引:1,自引:0,他引:1  
Surface and satellite-based observations show a decrease in Northern Hemisphere sea ice extent during the past 46 years. A comparison of these trends to control and transient integrations (forced by observed greenhouse gases and tropospheric sulfate aerosols) from the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory and Hadley Centre climate models reveals that the observed decrease in Northern Hemisphere sea ice extent agrees with the transient simulations, and both trends are much larger than would be expected from natural climate variations. From long-term control runs of climate models, it was found that the probability of the observed trends resulting from natural climate variability, assuming that the models' natural variability is similar to that found in nature, is less than 2 percent for the 1978-98 sea ice trends and less than 0.1 percent for the 1953-98 sea ice trends. Both models used here project continued decreases in sea ice thickness and extent throughout the next century.  相似文献   

12.
During the last interglacial period, ~125,000 years ago, sea level was at least several meters higher than at present, with substantial variability observed for peak sea level at geographically diverse sites. Speculation that the West Antarctic ice sheet collapsed during the last interglacial period has drawn particular interest to understanding climate and ice-sheet dynamics during this time interval. We provide an internally consistent database of coral U-Th ages to assess last interglacial sea-level observations in the context of isostatic modeling and stratigraphic evidence. These data indicate that global (eustatic) sea level peaked 5.5 to 9 meters above present sea level, requiring smaller ice sheets in both Greenland and Antarctica relative to today and indicating strong sea-level sensitivity to small changes in radiative forcing.  相似文献   

13.
The instrumental record of Antarctic sea ice in recent decades does not reveal a clear signature of warming despite observational evidence from coastal Antarctica. Here we report a significant correlation (P < 0.002) between methanesulphonic acid (MSA) concentrations from a Law Dome ice core and 22 years of satellite-derived sea ice extent (SIE) for the 80 degrees E to 140 degrees E sector. Applying this instrumental calibration to longer term MSA data (1841 to 1995 A.D.) suggests that there has been a 20% decline in SIE since about 1950. The decline is not uniform, showing large cyclical variations, with periods of about 11 years, that confuse trend detection over the relatively short satellite era.  相似文献   

14.
Lower Cretaceous bulk carbonate from deep sea sediments records sudden inputs of strontium resulting from the exposure of continental shelves. Strontium data from an interval spanning 7 million years in the Berriasian-Valanginian imply that global sea level fluctuated about 50 meters over time scales of 200,000 to 500,000 years, which is in agreement with the Exxon sea level curve. Oxygen isotope measurements indicate that the growth of continental ice sheets caused these rapid sea level changes. If glaciation caused all the rapid sea level changes in the Cretaceous that are indicated by the Exxon curve, then an Antarctic ice sheet may have existed despite overall climatic warmth.  相似文献   

15.
Summer ice and carbon dioxide   总被引:1,自引:0,他引:1  
The extent of Antarctic pack ice in the summer, as charted from satellite imagery, decreased by 2.5 million square kilometers between 1973 and 1980. The U.S. Navy and Russian atlases and whaling and research ship reports from the 1930's indicate that summer ice conditions earlier in this century were heavier than the current average. Surface air temperatures along the seasonally shifting belt of melting snow between 55 degrees and 80 degrees N during spring and summer were higher in 1974 to 1978 than in 1934 to 1938. The observed departures in the two hemispheres qualitatively agree with the predicted impact of an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide. However, since it is not known to, what extent the changes in snow and ice cover and in temperature can be explained by the natural variability of the climate system or by other processes unrelated to carbon dioxide, a cause-and-effect relation cannot yet be established.  相似文献   

16.
Antarctic Ice Sheet elevation changes, which are used to estimate changes in the mass of the interior regions, are caused by variations in the depth of the firn layer. We quantified the effects of temperature and accumulation variability on firn layer thickness by simulating the 1980-2004 Antarctic firn depth variability. For most of Antarctica, the magnitudes of firn depth changes were comparable to those of observed ice sheet elevation changes. The current satellite observational period ( approximately 15 years) is too short to neglect these fluctuations in firn depth when computing recent ice sheet mass changes. The amount of surface lowering in the Amundsen Sea Embayment revealed by satellite radar altimetry (1995-2003) was increased by including firn depth fluctuations, while a large area of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet slowly grew as a result of increased accumulation.  相似文献   

17.
We surveyed Antarctic krill (Euphausia superba) under sea ice using the autonomous underwater vehicle Autosub-2. Krill were concentrated within a band under ice between 1 and 13 kilometers south of the ice edge. Within this band, krill densities were fivefold greater than that of open water. The under-ice environment has long been considered an important habitat for krill, but sampling difficulties have previously prevented direct observations under ice over the scale necessary for robust krill density estimation. Autosub-2 enabled us to make continuous high-resolution measurements of krill density under ice reaching 27 kilometers beyond the ice edge.  相似文献   

18.
The Antarctic surge theory of Pleistocene glaciation is reexamined in the context of thermal convection theory applied to the Antarctic ice sheet. The ice sheet surges when a water layer at the base of the ice sheet reaches the edge of the ice sheet over broad fronts and has a thickness sufficient to drown the projections from the bed that most strongly hinder basal ice flow. Frictional heat from convection flow promotes basal melting, and, as the ice sheet grows to the continental shelf of Antarctica, a surge of the ice sheet appears likely.  相似文献   

19.
Measurements of the dissociation pressure of nitrogen hydrate and oxygen hydrate show that the clathrate hydrate of air with the formula (N(2), O(2)) 6H(2)O should exist below about 800 meters in the Antarctic ice sheet. This accounts for the disappearance of gas bubbles at depths greater than 1200 meters. The hydrate should exist from this depth to prise 0.06 percent of the ice.  相似文献   

20.
Isotopic records from polar ice cores imply globally asynchronous warming at the end of the last glaciation. However, 10Be exposure dates show that large-scale retreat of mid-latitude Last Glacial Maximum glaciers commenced at about the same time in both hemispheres. The timing of retreat is consistent with the onset of temperature and atmospheric CO2 increases in Antarctic ice cores. We suggest that a global trend of rising summer temperatures at the end of the Last Glacial Maximum was obscured in North Atlantic regions by hypercold winters associated with unusually extensive winter sea ice.  相似文献   

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