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In the Northern Hemisphere, for example, about 10,000 icebergs are produced each year from the West Greenland glaciers, and an average of 375 flow south of Newfoundland into the North Atlantic shipping lanes, where they are a hazard to navigation.
Icebergs breaking off Antarctica are unexpected hotspots of biological productivity and have a surprising role in climate change, reports a new study published in the journal Science.
"Global climate change is causing Antarctic ice shelves to shrink and split apart, yielding thousands of free-drifting icebergs in the nearby Weddell Sea," states a news release from the University of California at San Diego. "These floating islands of ice – some as large as a dozen miles across – are having a major impact on the ecology of the ocean around them, serving as “hotspots” for ocean life, with thriving communities of seabirds above and a web of phytoplankton, krill, and fish below."
As the Earth warms, its ice melts. This global melting is an early and obvious sign of climate change, but its implications go far beyond merely losing snow and ice. For starters, some people and ecosystems depend on the ice - glaciers for water supply in areas of seasonal rainfall, for example, and sea ice for habitat.
The melting of land ice is already raising sea levels. In some fairly likely scenarios, oceans would rise by meters worldwide with devastating results. A sea level rise of just one metre would displace tens of millions of people in Bangladesh alone. All of this melting ice could dilute the world's oceans – changing the salinity enough to hurt fish stocks and disrupt ocean circulation patterns globally.
Then there is the chance that melting ice will cause a feedback effect due to the fact that snow and ice reflect more sunlight than bare ground or water so less ice means more warming (which melts more ice, etc.).
