Sunday, September 1, 2013

Part of the heat that leads to the melting of Greenland comes from the interior of the Earth

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Greenland's ice is melting, in part, due to the heat from the Earth's mantle. This is the theory of a team of German investigators, who claims to have found a link between the thaw and the high heat flux from the planet's mantle.

The Greenland ice sheet is often considered an important contribution to the future global sea level rise during the next century â€" or more. In total, the island contains a quantity of ice that would lead to an increase of more than seven feet, if melted completely.

It is known that the ice loss has increased in the last decade. International IceGeoHeat research, led by the German Research Centre for Geosciences, GFZ advocates now that the effect of the Earth's crust and upper mantle in the current climate modeling is too simplistic.

Scientists have modeled the Earth's mantle in overlap with the ice pack and found that the fusion occurs in a given area due to the composition of the mantle underneath it. The group argues that this effect cannot be overlooked at the meeting of the data about climate change.

GFZ scientists combined climate models and previous ice with your new thermomechanical model for lithosphere of Greenland. The conclusions are that the temperature at the base of the ice and, therefore, the current dynamics of the Greenland's icy layer, is the result of the interaction between the flow of heat from inside the Earth and temperature changes associated with the glacial cycles.

The current climate is influenced by processes that go far back in the history of Earth: the lithosphere of Greenland is between 2.8 to 1.7 billion years ago and has only about 70 to 80 Km thick.

Researchers believe that the junction of ice dynamics models with models Thermo-mechanical attacks of solid Earth provides a more accurate overview of the processes that are taking to thaw.

The Greenland ice sheet loses about 227 giga tonnes of ice per year and contributes about 0.7 mm for the current change of the mean sea level of about three millimeters per year.

Photo: under Creative Commons license

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