Ice streams can be slowed down by gas hydrates
sticky spot the size of a small island once slowed down a large ice stream. It was comprised of gas hydrates according to a new study in Nature Geoscience.
One of the major questions today is: What are the ice sheets going to do in an ever-warming climate? Ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica are major contributors to the sea level rise, which can make life difficult for many coastal nations in the near future.
To understand the ice sheets we need to understand their drainage system – a key component of this is ice streams, fast-flowing rivers of ice, that deliver ice from the centre of the ice sheet to the oceans. Many of these ice streams are speeding up, which may be seen as the logical consequence of the warming climate. But some are slowing down, even stopping, examples of this may be found in the Ross ice streams of West Antarctica.
A new study in Nature Geoscience suggests that a 250km2 sticky spot made up of sediments with gas hydrates in them, slowed down an ice stream in the Barents Sea. This happened sometime during the last ice age, 20 000 years ago, when the Barents Sea was covered with an ice sheet.
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2016-04-ice-streams-gas-hydrates.html#jCp