2013年高中英语教学辅助素材：Ice-Age-Melt-Offers-Future-Climate-Clues（文本）.docVIP

When the climate began to warm during the last Ice Age about 23,000 years ago, much of the Northern Hemisphere was covered in ice. Nature Geoscience, researchers describe how ice sheets behaved in the past could help scientists better predict what might happen to them in a warmer world of our future. In two new studies published this week in University of Wisconsin geologist Anders Carlson studies ice sheet melt from land and ocean sediment cores. His study describes what prehistoric Earth was like in North America and Northern Europe some 140,000 years ago. 揥hat we found in this paper was that ice that抯 resting on land it responded very quickly to the warming climate, but then it didn抰 retreat really rapidly. It kind of chugged along and slowly melted like an ice cube if you put a hair dryer on it,?Carlson says, adding that was not the case with ice sheets floating on the ocean. 揗arine based ice sheets behave unpredictably. They may not do anything for a while, and then they all of a sudden respond very abruptly. They can rapidly disappear.? Greenland and Antarctica hold the Earth抯 last remaining ice sheets. In July, satellite data showed that 97 percent of the surface of the Greenland ice sheet had turned to slush over four days, a rate faster than at any time in recorded history. According to Carlson, it might be responding rapidly to small changes in temperature, similar to what he saw in the prehistoric record of ice sheets on land. 揃ut that said, they haven抰 catastrophically collapsed in the past either to rapidly raise sea level in the time scale that humans would care about, that we would be hard pressed to adapt to.? Carlson says the Antarctic marine-based ice sheet is less predictable. 揥hat this would say from the past is that these ice sheets, well they may not do anything for a bit. But then if you want to catastrophically raise sea level like on the orders of a meter or two in human lifetime, there is prehistoric precedent for that happening.