Free Republic
Browse · Search
General/Chat
Topics · Post Article

To: muawiyah
Now about Storegga-like events ~ those involve physical displacement, by a landslide, earth-fault movement, etc.. What I'm concerned with is quite a bit different. That is the sudden break of an ice dam that releases huge amounts of water.

Okay, because even in a dry-->wet base situation with floatation, you wouldn't get enough to create what you were suggesting!

Glacial Lake Agassiz has been studied extensively. Now, scale that up to something the size of Antarctica. Let an ice wall form at the boundary of the once far larger ice sheet as it melts at the end of the period of maximum glaciation.

I don't see your GLOF mechanism. Are you suggesting a MLD or Jökulhlaup?

Agassiz was cratonic. Antarctica is an entirely different story.

Also, if you have excess melting, how would you get the thickness required on such a small continent?

59 posted on 08/25/2010 6:49:03 PM PDT by Gondring (Paul Revere would have been flamed as a naysayer troll and told to go back to Boston.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 58 | View Replies ]


To: Gondring
Antarctic consists primarily of TWO BODIES. If it were fully melted you'd have two large islands. Over time with the overburden of ice removed, those bodies would rebound.

So, think about what's happened since the Glacial Maximum ~ MILES of Ice have melted (one way or the other) and as that has happened the two islands have rebounded.

Prior to that, there was so much ice that Antarctica was actually a very large divot or "crater" compared to the normal curve of the Earth.

The melt simply took place faster than the rebound!

Given the scale I'm not sure you want to compare this to a Jökulhlaup where you have a given amount of meltwater at the base of a glacier, an icedam breaks, and then the covering ice ~ far more massive than the meltwater ~ simply presses the water out through the hole.

This is simply more like a very large ice dam on the order of thousands of feet in height that has a wide area collapse. The water behind the dam simply pours out as fast as gravity can sustain the project. Kind of like a Johnstown Flood on steroids.

60 posted on 08/25/2010 7:18:05 PM PDT by muawiyah
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 59 | View Replies ]

Free Republic
Browse · Search
General/Chat
Topics · Post Article


FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson