China
Africa
Explore chapters and articles related to this topic
Climate Manifestations
Published in Gregory T. Haugan, The New Triple Constraints for Sustainable Projects, Programs, and Portfolios, 2016
Polar ice sheets are also melting and the Greenland ice sheet has experienced dramatic ice melt in recent years. The sea ice in Antarctica is melting and especially the West Antarctic ice sheet. The concern about the ice sheet melting is the impact on sea level rise As mentioned earlier, a large proportion of the rise in sea levels is due to ice sheet melting, and this proportion is expected to increase In addition to the danger of flooding, rising sea levels bring saltwater into rivers, spoil drinking wells, and turn fertile farmlands into useless fields of salty soil.
The glacier sedimentary system
Published in Richard J. Chorley, Stanley A. Schumm, David E. Sugden, Geomorphology, 2019
Richard J. Chorley, Stanley A. Schumm, David E. Sugden
Approximately 10 per cent of the earth’s land area is too cold for normal river activity and instead water exists in its frozen form as glaciers. Indeed, for most of the last 2–3 million years glaciers have extended over almost one-third of the earth’s land surface. Ice is much less easily deformed under the influence of gravity than water and there are several consequences which follow from this. First, as the ice moves across the surface of a continent, the interaction of a deforming solid with the underlying topography produces a distinctive geomorphological process/landform system. A second consequence is that ice can accumulate to great thicknesses – over 4 km in the case of the Antarctic ice sheet. This means that glaciers represent an important store in the earth’s hydrological system and, indeed, almost three-quarters of the earth’s fresh water is locked up in the polar ice sheets. A third consequence is that the response time of a particular glacier system is slow and, for example, the effects of an exceptionally heavy snowfall may not make themselves felt at a glacier snout for many years and, indeed, may often be suppressed altogether. A fourth consequence is that the flow process has a distinct morphological form. Thus there is a field of geomorphological study which views a glacier as a direct morphological expression of the sedimentary and metamorphic processes associated with ice accumulation and deformation. Finally, the great thickness of many glaciers implies that the crucial subglacial ice-rock interface is difficult to reach except round glacier margins or at the bottom of boreholes. This has meant that, compared to other geomorphological fields, understanding of subglacial processes depends more on theoretical models, laboratory experiments and inferences from landforms than on direct measurement of processes in the field.
Microalgae-Based Biorefinery for Utilization of Carbon Dioxide for Production of Valuable Bioproducts
Published in Ashok Kumar, Swati Sharma, 2 Utilization, 2020
Rahul Kumar Goswami, Komal Agrawal, Sanjeet Mehariya, Antonio Molino, Dino Musmarra, Pradeep Verma
According to Usui and Ikenouchi (1997), CO2 emission contributes to more than 68% of GHG, which is the most common reason for global warming. Currently, global warming is the most serious problem because Antarctic ice sheets are losing their mass, leading to an increase in sea level along with frequent heatwaves for a longer period (Pires 2017).
Analyzing Antarctic ice sheet snowmelt with dynamic Big Earth Data
Published in International Journal of Digital Earth, 2021
Dong Liang, Huadong Guo, Lu Zhang, Mingwei Wang, Lizhe Wang, Lei Liang, Zeeshan Shirazi
Antarctica is located at Earth’s southernmost point and consists of ice shelves and islands in addition to the continent itself. The total area is 14.051 million km2, which accounts for 9.4% of Earth’s land area, while 98% of the Antarctic continent is covered by snow and ice throughout the year, with an average thickness of 2000–2500 m and a maximum thickness of 4200 m. The Antarctic ice sheet is generally divided into three parts, the East Antarctic and West Antarctic ice sheets and parts of the Antarctic Peninsula ice sheet (Golledge et al. 2019). The West Antarctic ice sheet is a fold belt composed of mountains, plateaus, and basins. The area of the East Antarctic ice sheet is twice the area of the West Antarctic ice sheet. Antarctica has a cold, dry, mostly continental climate, though the Antarctic Peninsula has a relatively mild climate. Interannually cyclic freezing and thawing of the Antarctic ice sheet occurs mainly in areas near the coastal zone and on ice shelves.
Correlation and interaction between temperature and freeze-thaw in representative regions of Antarctica
Published in International Journal of Digital Earth, 2022
Dong Liang, Huadong Guo, Qing Cheng, Lu Zhang, Lingyi Kong
The Antarctic ice sheet is the largest on Earth and a critical area for studying global climate change because it is sensitive to minor changes in the global temperature. Meanwhile, Big Earth Data has provided useful information in global climate change research and has promoted the field's development on a global scale (Guo, Zhang, and Zhu 2015; Guo et al. 2021, 2022).