Findings offer innovative ways to improve weather forecasting, measure climate-change impacts.
Findings offer innovative ways to improve weather forecasting, measure climate-change impacts.
Rising temperatures of the world’s oceans threaten to accelerate the melting and splintering of glaciers—thereby potentially increasing the number of icebergs and, with it, the need to better understand more about their movement and impact. Through a series of experiments, a team of scientists has pinpointed some of the factors that cause icebergs to capsize, offering insights into how climate change may affect Earth’s waters.
“Our study contributes fundamental knowledge about ice physics, which is a vital factor in the health of our planet and which needs to be understood to improve climate modeling and weather forecasting,” explains Leif Ristroph, an associate professor at New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences and the senior author of the paper, which appears in the journal Physical Review Fluids. “These results show how iceberg melting and capsizing are related in complicated ways. This information is crucial as ice melting can be considered the ‘canary in the coalmine’: the earliest warning of when the Earth is warming or otherwise out of its usual balance.”
The researchers, who also included NYU’s Bobae Johnson, Zihan Zhang, and Alison Kim as well as the Flatiron Institute’s Scott Weady, conducted a series of experiments in the university’s Applied Mathematics Laboratory that replicated floating icebergs.
Read More: New York University
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