DrTodd13, on Nov 20 2006, 09:47 AM, said:
From what I can tell, no one is quite sure what is going to happen to the various ice sheets. There's an enormous number of separate feedback loops involved.
Almost all of the climate models predict that warmer temperatures will increase the amount of snowfall in the artic and the antartic. In theory, its possible that the increase in mass at the center of the of the ice-sheets from snowfall could outweight the loss of mass at the edges from calvation and ice melt. Coupled with this, dramatic pictures of edge sheets fracturing makes for much more exciting press than slow/sustained snowfall.
Balanced against this, you have a number of other issues. Meltwater can act as a lubricant, which, in turn would increase the speed at which the ice moves down to the sea. There's much more surface area at the edges of the sheets than at the centers, so if the edges fail in a dramatic fashion you have much less energy being reflected from the earth's surface.
Finally, its unclear whether the amount of mass thats locked up in ice sheets will have a major impact on sea levels. Many of the seal level models focus on thermal expansion of a given quantity of water rather than changes in the quantity of water.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archi...other-glaciers/ has a decent primer on some of these topics. They don't directly address the paper that Todd referenced, however, there are references to early work by the same authors.
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