By Larry Dignan
Researchers with an assist from NASA have mapped how much glacial ice is moving to sea after a collapse of an Antarctic ice shelf.
NASA said the aim of the project is to detail ice losses and then predict sea level impacts as Antarctic ice breaks away.
Researchers from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), the Laboratoire d’Etudes en Geophysique et Oceanographie Spatiales, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique at the University of Toulouse, France, and the University of Colorado’s National Snow and Ice Data Center, Boulder, Colo., were involved with the project.
The group combined NASA’s satellite data with information from CNES, the French space agency, and mapped it against previous ice shelf losses in 1995, 2001, 2002 and 2009. The upshot: Antarctic ice loss was 11.2 gigatons a year from 2001 to 2006 and 10.2 gigatons from 2006 to 2010.
Here’s a look at the Larsen B ice shelf collapse from 2002 and there’s an animation at NASA.
Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of ZDNet and SmartPlanet as well as Editorial Director of ZDNet’s sister site TechRepublic. He was most recently Executive Editor of News and Blogs at ZDNet. Prior to that he was executive news editor at eWeek and news editor at Baseline. He also served as the East Coast news editor and finance editor at CNET News.com.
Larry has covered the technology and financial services industry since 1995, publishing articles in WallStreetWeek.com, Inter@ctive Week, The New York Times, and Financial Planning magazine. He’s a graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism and the University of Delaware.
(Source: www.smartplanet.com )