How stable is the West Antarctic Ice Sheet?

Tuesday, February 9, 2016 - 10:40 in Earth & Climate

A future warming of the Southern Ocean caused by rising greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere may severely disrupt the stability of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. The result would be a rise in the global sea level by several metres. A collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet may have occurred during the last interglacial period 125,000 years ago, a period when the polar surface temperature was around two degrees Celsius higher than today. This is the result of a series of model simulations which the researchers of the Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) have published online in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

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