Ice
in sentence
1200 examples of Ice in a sentence
But what makes the Ross Sea important is the vast sea of pack
ice
that in the spring and summer provides a wealth of phytoplankton and krill that supports what, till recently, has been a virtually intact near-shore ecosystem.
It's still heavy now, and it was heavy before that, but when you flipped open a newspaper, when you turned on the TV, it was about
ice
caps melting, wars going on around the world, earthquakes, hurricanes and an economy that was wobbling on the brink of collapse, and then eventually did collapse, and so many of us losing our homes, or our jobs, or our retirements, or our livelihoods.
I'll get some asshole at a watering hole asking what brand the
ice
is.
Driving them home, and they want them to be enlightened, so they take them to Ben & Jerry's
ice
cream company with its own foreign policy.
Then 10,000 years ago, exploiting a sudden change in global climate with the end of the last
ice
age, humans learned to farm.
That means that I use radar to study glaciers and
ice
sheets.
And like most glaciologists right now, I'm working on the problem of estimating how much the
ice
is going to contribute to sea level rise in the future.
This is produced using
ice
sheet and climate models.
So why can't we say with confidence whether or not a significant portion of a continent-scale
ice
sheet will or will not collapse?
And that's hard to know, because those processes and conditions are taking place beneath kilometers of ice, and satellites, like the one that produced this image, are blind to observe them.
In fact, we have much more comprehensive observations of the surface of Mars than we do of what's beneath the Antarctic
ice
sheet.
And in terms of time, we now know that
ice
sheets not only evolve over the timescale of millennia and centuries, but they're also changing over the scale of years and days.
So what we want is observations beneath kilometers of
ice
at the scale of a continent, and we want them all the time.
I said in the beginning that I was a radio glaciologist, and the reason that that's a thing is that airborne ice-penetrating radar is the main tool we have to see inside of
ice
sheets.
These are used to transmit radar signals down into the
ice.
And the echos that come back contain information about what's happening inside and beneath the
ice
sheet.
And I think this is actually a misconception about this type of fieldwork, where people imagine scientists peering out the window, contemplating the landscape, its geologic context and the fate of the
ice
sheets.
This is a radargram, which is a vertical profile through the
ice
sheet, kind of like a slice of cake.
The bright layer on the top is the surface of the
ice
sheet, the bright layer on the bottom is the bedrock of the continent itself, and the layers in between are kind of like tree rings, in that they contain information about the history of the
ice
sheet.
And here we're peering through three kilometers of
ice.
And there are sophisticated, interesting, electromagnetic reasons for that, but let's say for now that
ice
is basically the perfect target for radar, and radar is basically the perfect tool to study
ice
sheets.
And when you put those together, you get an image like this, which is what the continent of Antarctica would look like without all the
ice
on top.
The red features are volcanoes or mountains; the areas that are blue would be open ocean if the
ice
sheet was removed.
It does not give us any indication of how the
ice
sheet is changing in time.
So that produced two million high-resolution images that my group is now working on analyzing and processing for comparing with contemporary conditions in the
ice
sheet.
And as amazing as it is that we can look at what was happening under the
ice
sheet 50 years ago, this is still just one more snapshot.
So you take these radars and put them on the
ice
sheet and you bury a cache of car batteries.
And you leave them out there for months or years at a time, and they send a pulse down into the
ice
sheet every so many minutes or hours.
And if we're going to do that, we're going to need totally new ways of observing the
ice
sheet.
But it turns out that detecting the reflection of the sun off the surface of the ocean and detecting the reflection off the bottom of an
ice
sheet are extremely geophysically similar.
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