Ice Sheets May Collapse Faster Than Predicted miragenews.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from miragenews.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Ice sheets can retreat up to 600 metres a day during periods of climate warming, 20 times faster than the highest rate of retreat previously measured.
An international team of researchers, led by Dr Christine Batchelor of Newcastle University, UK, used high-resolution imagery of the seafloor to reveal just how quickly a former ice sheet that extended from Norway retreated at the end of the last Ice Age, about 20,000 years ago.
The team, which also included researchers from the universities of Cambridge and Loughborough in the UK and the Geological Survey of Norway, mapped more than 7,600 small-scale landforms called ‘corrugation ridges’ across the seafloor. The ridges are less than 2.5 m high and are spaced between about 25 and 300 metres apart.
Their results provide a warning from the past about the speeds that ice sheets are physically capable of retreating at.
The researchers say that information about how ice sheets behaved during past periods of climate warming is impo