Antarctic ice models “not correct”, sea level rise “complicated”

There’s some surprising reaction to the press release we covered on WUWT recently.

Here’s some excerpts:

Knowing how the massive ice sheets atop  Antarctica and Greenland work is key to
predicting how global warming could raise sea  levels and flood coastal cities. But a new study  upends what scientists thought they knew. It  turns out it’s not just ancient snow that makes  up the ice sheets, but water deep under the  sheets also thaws and refreezes over time.

To put it in non-scientific terms, lead scientist  Robin Bell told msnbc.com, the study
redefines “how squishy” the base of ice sheets can be. “This matters to how fast ice will flow and how fast ice sheets will change.”

“It also means that ice sheet models are not correct,” she said, comparing it to “trying to
figure out how a car will drive but forgetting to  add the tires. The performance will be very
different if you are driving on the rims.”

Reporting in this week’s issue of the peer-reviewed journal Science, Bell and his team
described how ice-penetrating radar peeled  back two miles of ice a million years old in the
center of Antarctica.

…

This radar image shows part of the East Antarctic ice sheet (top), a bulge of refrozen ice (center), and the profile of a mountain range buried deep below (outlined in red).

Full story plus an interactive tool here

View the original article here