What are the major components of the cryosphere?

What are the major components of the cryosphere?

The cryosphere is the part of the Earth’s climate system that includes solid precipitation, snow, sea ice, lake and river ice, icebergs, glaciers and ice caps, ice sheets, ice shelves, permafrost, and seasonally frozen ground.

What are the three main components of the cryosphere Earth system?

The cryosphere is loosely defined as the component of the earth’s climate system consisting of frozen water. In one way or another, all components of the cryosphere interact with and influence the ocean. The cryosphere can be considered to consist of sea ice, land ice, and atmospheric ice.

What is the largest component of the cryosphere?

The term “cryosphere” comes from the Greek word, “krios,” which means cold. Ice and snow on land are one part of the cryosphere. This includes the largest parts of the cryosphere, the continental ice sheets found in Greenland and Antarctica, as well as ice caps, glaciers, and areas of snow and permafrost.

What does the cryosphere consist of?

The cryosphere contains the frozen parts of the planet. It includes snow and ice on land, ice caps, glaciers, permafrost, and sea ice.

Is a tongue of ice?

a projection of the ice edge up to several km in length caused by wind and current; usually forms when a valley glacier moves very quickly into a lake or ocean.

Is the cryosphere part of the atmosphere?

The cryosphere is an integral part of the global climate system with important linkages and feedbacks generated through its influence on surface energy and moisture fluxes, clouds, precipitation, hydrology, atmospheric and oceanic circulation. The term deglaciation describes the retreat of cryospheric features.

What is ice tongue and ice shelf?

An ice shelf is a thick slab of ice, attached to a coastline and extending out over the ocean as a seaward extension of the grounded ice sheet. (An ice shelf occupying a fjord is sometimes called an ice tongue.)

How does ice tongue form?

An ice tongue forms when a valley glacier moves very rapidly out into the sea or a lake. When the sea ice in McMurdo Sound thaws in the summer, the ice tongue floats on the water without thawing. It also calves off in places forming icebergs. In the winter, the sea freezes once more around these new shapes.

What animals live in the cryosphere?

Many different living organisms within the biosphere rely on parts of the cryosphere for water and habitat. Polar bears roam across Arctic sea ice as they hunt for seals. Arctic cod take shelter in areas underneath the sea ice. Some penguins rely on the ice during their breeding season.

What are the main components of the cryosphere?

1.4.1 Components of the cryosphere. The cryosphere is the portion of the Earth’s surface where water is in solid form. It thus includes sea ice, lake ice and river-ice, snow cover, glaciers, ice caps and ice sheets, and frozen ground.

How big is the ice in the cryosphere?

Current best estimates, based on improved remote sensing technology for determining ice extent, place ice storage at 3 × 107 km 3, of which the Antarctic ice sheet makes up about 90% ( IPCC, 1996b ). Since inflows and outflows are small, at least in the current climate mode, the cryosphere is a fairly static component of the hydrosphere.

How much water is stored in the cryosphere?

Due to the remoteness of most of the planet’s ice-covered areas, estimates of water stored in the cryosphere have a high degree of uncertainty. Current best estimates, based on improved remote sensing technology for determining ice extent, place ice storage at 3 × 107 km 3, of which the Antarctic ice sheet makes up about 90% ( IPCC, 1996b ).

Is the cryosphere in the northern or Southern Hemisphere?

The cryosphere is the portion of Earth’s surface where water exists in solid form. In the winter, snow covers more than 60% of the Northern Hemisphere’s land area whereas there is little snow cover in the Southern Hemisphere except for Antarctica (UNEP/GRID-Arendal, 2007).