The Melting of the Antarctic Ice Cover and Assessing Its Change Over the Past Millennium Using Climate Models

• Main Author: Zhaden, Oleg
• Format: Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: 2011
• Subjects: Antarctic; Greenland; The Antarctic; Antarc*; Antarctica; glacier; GRIP
• Online Access: https://oceanrep.geomar.de/id/eprint/28378/; https://oceanrep.geomar.de/id/eprint/28378/1/2011_Zhaden-Oleg_MSc-Thesis.pdf

This work covers the assessment of melting trends of the Antarctic ice cover over the last millennium. BACKGROUND Recent evidence of dramatic climate change has prompted well grounded – and not purely academic - interest in probable consequences of this phenomenon. Global climate change inevitably entails major changes for all living beings on the Earth including human population. One of the most important and potentially harmful consequences in thought to be raising of the World Ocean level which will happen if global ice cover melts down. Because the Antarctica and Greenland account for more than 90% of the world's ice melting of these two ice caps makes a major contribution to global ocean level increase. If the Antarctic and Greenland ice caps melted down completely global ocean level would increase by 70 meters – a serious threat to those who live in the coastal areas, which is about half of the global population. Even melting of just a fraction of the ice cover and resulting increase by a few meters is serious enough. So the state and dynamics of the Antarctic and Greenland ice caps is the subject of intense concern of scientists and environmentalists worldwide. It is also necessary to take into consideration that the glacier melting is not the only process which may lead to sea level rise. The melting itself is a quite gradual process, we could not imagine the climatic conditions by which a huge amount of ice will be able to melt immediately. At least, by the current conditions such a development of the situation seems to be an unlikely event. However, there is a probability of other process which potentially more dangerous and less predictable in terms of velocity of sea level rise - the acceleration of glacier flow and input of ice into the ocean. As compared with a melting of glaciers, the danger of such an ice movement is that for this is just enough a thaw of ice-bed contact and therefore it might occur on a much earlier stage of the melting. We know that the glacier grip with the underlying bed is ...