What is an Ice Sheet?
An ice sheet is a large glacier, typically covering over 50,000 km2 and inundating the underlying topography. Ice sheets have domes. Domes are topographic high areas. Ice flows radially out from a dome. Divides mark the boundary between ice flowing in one direction from ice flowing in the opposite direction. Flow lines are hypothetical paths taken by each particle of ice. Ice sheets are drained by ice streams or outlet glaciers, both of which are areas of very fast moving ice. The ice streams and outlet glaciers may feed an ice shelf, which is a large area of floating glacial ice still attached to the ice sheet. There are two kinds of ice sheets – marine-based and terrestrial. Marine-based ice sheets – such as the West Antarctic Ice Sheet – rest on land that is below sea level. If a marine-based ice sheet were to be removed, there would only be ocean and a few islands left. In contrast, a terrestrial ice sheet occurs on land that is mostly above sea level. Names of Ice Sheets Laurentid
An ice sheet is a are huge mass of perennial ice that form on land through the recrystallization of snow, and that compress and moves under its own weight. There are two major ice sheets on Earth: the Greenland Ice Sheet, and the Antarctic Ice Sheet. The Greenland Ice Sheet is more than two miles thick in the center.
An ice sheet is a large permanent layer of ice covering a continental shelf, defined as having an extent greater than 50,000 km2 (19,305 mi2). An ice sheet is larger than a glacier or ice shelf. There are two ice sheets in the world today: the Antarctic ice sheet (which contains 61% of fresh water on the planet) and the Greenland ice sheet (containing 7%). Only about 32% of the world’s fresh water is found in streams, lakes, and aquifers — the rest can be found in the ice sheets. Ice sheets form when snow falls on ground with a subzero temperature and doesn’t melt, even seasonally. Over thousands of years, the snow builds up and compacts into ice, forming sheets averaging 1 mi (1.6 km) thick, or up to 2 mi (3.2 km) at maximum. In some areas of the West Antarctic ice sheet, the base is as far as 1.5 mi (2.4 km) below sea level, comparable to the depth of some areas of ocean. If the entire Antarctic ice sheet or the Greenland ice sheet were to melt, the world’s seas would rise by about 6
