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An ice sheet is a body of ice which covers a land area of continental size - meaning that it exceeds 50,000 km 2. [4] The currently existing two ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica have a much greater area than this minimum definition, measuring at 1.7 million km 2 and 14 million km 2, respectively. Both ice sheets are also very thick, as ...
Ice sheet, any glacier that extends in continuous sheets, moving outward in all directions, whose area exceeds more than 50,000 square km (19,000 square miles). In general, such expanses of frozen water are called ice sheets if they are the size of Antarctica or Greenland and ice caps if they are.
10 lis 2023 · An ice sheet is a mass of glacial ice more than 50,000 square kilometers (19,000 square miles). Ice sheets contain about 99% of the fresh water on Earth, and are sometimes called continental glaciers. As ice sheets extend to the coast and over the ocean, they become ice shelves.
Overview. What is an ice sheet? A portion of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet drains into the ice-covered Bellingshausen Sea via an S-shaped glacier. The top of the glacier is rippled with crevasses, indicating the ice is flowing over steep terrain. — Credit: NASA Operation IceBridge.
An ice sheet is a mass of glacial land ice, extending more than 50,000 square kilometers (20,000 square miles). Ice sheets can cover underlying canyons and mountain ranges. During the last ice age, ice sheets also covered much of North America and Scandinavia.
Ice sheets are continental-scale masses of ice that rest on land. The shape of an ice sheet is a dome that slopes downwards toward its edges, where the interior ice may be thousands of meters thick and the ice around the edges tens of meters thick.
Ice Sheets. A continuous sheet of land ice that covers a very large area and moves outward in many directions. This type of ice mass is so thick as to mask the land surface contours, in contrast to the smaller and thinner highland ice. The continental glacier of Greenland is sometimes called the Inland Ice.
