Scientists recently took a closer look at what is causing the ice shelves of Antarctica to break into huge chunks aside from the evident climate change factor.
A report from Futurism's The Byte specified that in search for the cause, the researchers also discovered that the so-called "glue" that holds it all together is in worryingly rough form.
Seemingly, the said research specified that the ice shelves have a way to fix themselves when they begin to split and crack apart.
When the ice shelf begins thinning out, the icy glue, also called mélange, can fill these cracks for it to be fused back together.
But as researchers at NASA and the University of California found that icy glue is just as susceptible to rising temperatures. More so, a changing climate as the ice is, there can be a disaster when it fails.
Watering 'Ice Mélange'
To come up with the result, scientists carried out replications of three scenarios in which either the ice shelf, the mélange, or both began to thin out.
Provided that the mélange remained intact, the ice shelf was able to fix itself. However, if the mileage began to melt as well, breakages in the ice grew relatively faster.
According to study co-author Eric Rignot, a geologist at the University of California, Irvine, the watering of the ice mélange that's guiling together huge segments of floating ice shelves is yet another way climate change can lead to the rapid retreat of ice shelves of Antarctica.
The geologist explained, "with this in mind," there may be a need to rethink their calculations about the timing and degree of rising sea level from polar ice loss. Rignot cited an example of this that could come sooner and with a greater explosion than expected.
The study's lead author and researcher at NASA, Eric Larour, said the problem is that mélange is quite thinner compared to the shelf ice. And the moment it begins to melt away, it basically just becomes an inadequate pool of slush.
The researchers found, is adequate to explain some of the major ice shelf breakages in recent years. And as temperatures continuously rise, Antarctica will be able to depend even less on its self-repairing glue, putting the ice shelf in a dangerous position.
Ice Shelves
The Jaun News USA reported that Ice shelves are gigantic stretches of ice that accumulate over many thousands of years, as previously reported by Live Science.
Nonetheless, warming air and rising temperatures of the ocean have been driving ice shelves to degenerate. A lot of the ice shelves of Antarctica have fractured or collapsed in the last couple of decades.
The study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal specified that what's exactly accelerating the ice melting remains unclear.
To find out, geologists zoomed in on rifts on the Larsen C Ice Shelf of Antarctica, which calved a Delaware-size iceberg identified as A68 in the middle of 2017.
The separation of A68, an iceberg approximately 5,800 square kilometers in site, decreased Larsen C's size by 12 percent. Essentially Larsen C is the third ice shelf on the western peninsula of Antarctica to go through massive ice loss in the last 20 years.
Related information about Antarctica's melting ice sheet is shown on Behind the Scenes' YouTube video below:
Check out more news and information on Antarctica on Science Times.
