Study Offers Preview of Ice Sheet Melting, Rapid Climate Changes
The study, which appears in the current issue of the journal Science, was led by researchers from the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and Oregon State University and contributed to by scientists from eight European institutes. They conclude that ice sheets in different parts of the world can react quite differently as the Earth warms.
"When we look at the Scandinavian Ice Sheet, we sometimes see it actually growing larger and sometimes rapidly disappearing, depending on whether increased snow offsets melting effects or not," says Vincent Rinterknecht, a post-doctoral research scientist at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory who is the study's lead author and who conducted much of the research while he was a doctoral student at Oregon State. "Our work showed that it actually grew for a long period while the climate was warming but still very cold, and then rapidly disintegrated once the climate warmed even further."