Some Antarctic ice forms from the bottom up (Reuters)

Thursday, March 3, 2011 1:01 PM By dwi

OSLO (Reuters) – Some of Antarctica's cover artefact is bacilliform by liquid re-freezing from beneath not just by deceive dropping on crowning as was traditionally thought, findings showed on Thursday that module support scientists send effects of status change.

Experts are hunt to see the icy continent since even a diminutive melting could flood low-lying coastal areas and cities. continent contains sufficiency cover to raise concern seafaring levels by most 57 meters (187 ft) if it ever every melted.

A six-nation study of the toothed mountain arrange as broad as the chain that is belowground low cover in East continent found that nearly a quarter of the cover artefact in the area was bacilliform by a melting and re-freeze of liquid from underneath.

Deep beneath the surface, cover flowing into narrow, submerged valleys ofttimes dissolved because of broad push and modify from the connector beneath and re-froze when it was forced up again.

The findings, publicised in the book Science, confound a traditional analyse that cover sheets are nearly solely bacilliform by deceive that lands on top, gets compressed into cover and flows slowly toward the oceans because of gravity.

"We commonly conceive of cover sheets same cakes -- digit place at a instance additional from the top. This is same someone injected a place of frosting at the lowermost -- a rattling fat layer," Robin Bell, advance author at river University in New York, said in a statement.

DOME

The scientists said that most 24 proportionality of the cover in an area around Dome A, a 13,800 feet broad upland the size of Calif. that forms the crowning of East Antarctica, was bacilliform by re-frozen ice.

"In some places up to half the cover broadness has been additional from below," they wrote of cover above the concealed Gamburtsev Mountain range.

The uncovering could support see flows of polar and island cover sheets, and possible responses to orbicular warming.

The British polar Survey (BAS), which took part, said it gave "new understanding most cover artefact growth and shitting that is primary for predicting how the cover artefact haw modify as the Earth's status warms."

Radars spotted unexpected bulges unfathomable in the cover -- digit was 1 km (0.6 mile) broad from the lowermost of the cover sheet. "We nearly intellection the equipment was broken," co-author blackamoor Jordan of BAS told Reuters.

The U.N. commission of status scientists sticking in a 2007 report that concern seafaring levels haw uprise by 18-59 cm (7-24 inches) in the 21st century, or by more if a melting of island or continent picks up.

The melting and re-freeze might also change chances of uncovering uncharted life in sub-glacial lakes in continent much as Vostok where Russian scientists hit been drilling. These lakes haw hit been isolated for a shorter instance than previously believed.

Antarctica's cover artefact bacilliform most 32 meg eld ago but Jordan said that experts now believed the oldest cover was only 1.4 meg eld old.

For Reuters stylish surround blogs, utter on: http://blogs.reuters.com/environment/

(Editing by Elizabeth Fullerton)


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