Talk:Ice-sheet dynamics

GA Review

This article is about a very interesting subject, but needs to be a bit kinder to the layman. At the moment, it more-or-less presumes the reader is an engineer, and that's not a safe assumption, particularly given the climatology aspect of this. This does have the basis of a good article, but needs a lot more introductory material. Shoemaker's Holiday (talk) 22:43, 20 May 2008 (UTC)

Expansion

The article could be expanded to include details of:

1. the effects of D-O cycles - see Denton 2000
2. The 100 year cycle in Antartica - see Hulbe et al 2007
3. The binge-purge cycles and Heinrich events - see Maslin 2001

Smith609 Talk 10:02, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

...and, a mere five years later, I've just noticed there should be something on cold-based glaciation in here. DanHobley (talk) 04:23, 26 July 2013 (UTC)

Can editor fix obscure sentence?

"Ice shelves are thick layers of ice floating on the sea – can stabilise the glaciers that feed them." (AltheaCase (talk) 13:21, 5 August 2023 (UTC))

Merge Marine ice sheet instability to this article?

Effectively, I do not think that marine ice sheet instability as a concept would make much sense to an average reader without an explanation of the more basic dynamics provided by this article. Consequently, the two should be read together. Neither article is particularly large either, so the merger can be done fairly easily. InformationToKnowledge (talk) 18:25, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

I would be supportive of that. I am just wondering if the article of the final merged article should be something different? Actually "marine ice sheet instability" seems easier to understand than "Ice-sheet dynamics", but I guess the latter is the more scientifically correct term? But is it worth keeping the term "marine" in it? I guess by definition, "ice sheets" are always on the ocean. What would be the search term though that people want to look up? And do we really need the dash in "Ice-sheet"? I usually see it written without the dash. EMsmile (talk) 20:31, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

It's actually the other way around. That is, marine ice sheet instability (MISI) is a highly specific example of scientific terminology, which is used verbatim in hundreds (if not thousands) of papers by now, including in the IPCC reports. Ice sheets are absolutely not "always on the ocean" - the whole reason why Greenland and East Antarctica ice sheets are so much more stable than West Antarctica is because the majority of either's volume is essentially isolated from the ocean, so the instability barely applies to them.

It is exactly because the term is so specific, though, that there is no way a merged article can possibly be named after it, since most of what the dynamics article talks about is outside the scope of the term MISI, while instability can be easily described as part of ice sheet dynamics.

What would be the search term though that people want to look up?

Probably just ice sheet, actually. It appears that article, as basic as it is, has 10-15 times more daily views than either one of these articles. I guess it's conceivable to merge all of this information to ice sheet - while this article isn't too small, and would become larger after the merge, so much of the text here is outdated and fairly bloated, like many of these articles first written in late 2000s and barely touched since then.

However, it would likely be easier to merge these articles first, clean up and condense the combined article as much as possible, then merge the end result into ice sheet, so that it would have meaningful information in addition to excerpts. InformationToKnowledge (talk) 13:05, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

Yes, that's even better! To merge all three articles into one, with the final title ice sheet. That one gets quite a bit more views than the other two. I did a bit or work on it last December and agree with you that it's currently too thin. I found it interesting that two sub-articles (Greenland ice sheet and Antarctic ice sheet) were far better and more detailed than the parent article (ice sheet). That's why I opted for excerpts in that case. Regarding page views, they are fairly similar, see here (Antarctic ice sheet gets the most out of those three). EMsmile (talk) 15:30, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

I keep forgetting that Antarctic ice sheet not only exists, but keeps receiving this many views! It's rather unfortunate, because the EAIS and WAIS are really very different and scientific literature practically always studies them separately - to the point that they only seem to be discussed together in the context of Antarctica-wide warming and net sea level rise. Scientific literature on AIS might be larger than on EAIS, but I am practically certain it's going to be a lot smaller than the body of research on WAIS. For these reasons, I am not even sure if the "parent-child article" analogy even makes sense here.

This might have been bold, but I also decided to rework that article to mainly rely on excerpts. The overlap between it and climate change in Antarctica seems both natural and inescapable, so I don't think there was anything else to do. There was seemingly very little in the article which the excerpts didn't already cover better, anyway. InformationToKnowledge (talk) 20:23, 29 January 2024 (UTC)

I think that having an Antarctic ice sheet page separate from WAIS and EAIS makes sense. Unlike the Antarctic ice sheet article suggests, the ice is continuous: ice flows between and covers completely over some sections of the transantarctic mountains. While it is useful in terms of study to divide them, on the global scale they are often referred to as a unified ice sheet. Some studies further divide the ice over the antarctic peninsula as a separate region of study as well.

having the Antarctic ice sheet page be based on linked excerpts could work very well. Puddlesofmilk (talk) 21:58, 29 January 2024 (UTC)

Oh no, I am not suggesting removing that article entirely! This was more to express my frustration after I spent the first half of this month on painstakingly updating the two ice sheet articles (not to mention my work on GrIS last month), only to discover that a far more widely viewed article had been in a poor state all along. With the use of excerpts, I think it's now looking alright, and I am glad that you seem to agree.

And I have heard of the Peninsula ice being separated, but I have not seen much about the ice sheet connections between/over the Transantarctic Mountains. I checked Geography of Antarctica, but it wasn't particularly useful either. Since you seem to understand the subject well, would you consider updating those articles with a proper explanation of how they are connected based on reliable sources?InformationToKnowledge (talk) 08:04, 30 January 2024 (UTC)

Understood, yes I like that the main AIS article now points to the more detailed sections in the other two.

I added some info to that article, but I think it could use more work. I added some of my initial ideas to the talk page there. Puddlesofmilk (talk) 20:33, 31 January 2024 (UTC)

• Merge yes I had a quick look and they seem to be small enough to eventually all go in ice sheetChidgk1 (talk) 17:40, 19 January 2024 (UTC)

• Merge I also like the idea of merging marine ice sheet instability into this article, and maybe both of them into ice sheet.

Currently, information on "ice flow" directs to here. most of this information is also relevant for people looking for information on glaciers that are not part of an ice sheet. is there a better way to organize that? I think of "glacier dynamics" as more general than ice sheet dynamics Puddlesofmilk (talk) 21:53, 28 January 2024 (UTC)

There is glacier mass balance. Do you think that could work? InformationToKnowledge (talk) 20:24, 29 January 2024 (UTC)

I don't think it should in glacier mass balance. glacier mass balance is about the addition or loss of ice, not about the way in which it moves. As long as a critical mass of ice exists, glaciers flow no matter what their mass balance is. The ways in which they are measured and studied can differ dramatically as well. Puddlesofmilk (talk) 22:02, 29 January 2024 (UTC)

To rephrase my thought, glacier, ice field, ice cap, and ice sheet are all separate pages, with their own definitions and examples and so on. However, the information presented here under ice sheet dynamics is either mostly or entirely applicable to the other, smaller glacial ice formations. While there are differences in the scale of the dynamics, the underlying processes remain consistent. Could the name of this article be more general to consolidate information on glacial processes and dynamics across all of these scales?

edit: for instance even marine ice sheet instability is not limited as a process to the dynamics of ice sheets (https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-817129-5.00009-3), and some of the earliest observations foundational to its theory were of Columbia Glacier (Alaska).

Puddlesofmilk (talk) 22:12, 29 January 2024 (UTC)

I suppose we could rename this article to "Ice flow dynamics" or something similar. The issue is that such an article would assuredly remain stuck around where this article is now - at low double digit pageviews at most, which I would rather avoid.

I would say my preferred solution is to redirect "ice flow" to a newly created section in the Ice article itself. Incredibly, that top-level article barely has anything to say about any of the Earth's large ice formations, and devotes far more space to hail and snowflakes. It's not even overly large either, so we can easily fit one-two paragraphs to at least name the ice sheets and major mountain glaciers and provide brief facts about their size, age, etc. (Currently, there is just a single sentence in Ice#On land and structures.) Then, there would be a similarly brief overview of major flow processes, which is where "ice flow" is going to redirect to.

That overview section would have "See also" links to something like a "Dynamics" section for the Ice sheet article - which is where this article would be ultimately merged - and to Glacier#Motion, which is where I think much of this article's information would ultimately be headed. (After both that information and the Motion section are cleaned up, of course.) That way, we'll ensure that these important findings are seen by the largest possible number of people, and we should also have enough leftover space in the article on Ice to actually discuss climate change at the end (currently conspicuously missing from it.) InformationToKnowledge (talk) 06:49, 30 January 2024 (UTC)

P.S. The more I look at the glacier mass balance article, the more skeptical I become that we actually need it to be standalone. It receives relatively few views and while simply merging it to glacier would make the combined article prohibitively large, it's so bloated with unreferenced or poorly referenced text that the majority of it can and should be shed. (The massive block of text on the PTAA model is most egregious example, but far from the only one.)

"Mass balance research worldwide" is another large section, but it seems like it could just be a table listing all the research stations mentioned. The sentences on "negative mass balance in area X" could then be moved to Retreat of glaciers since 1850 - once that article is also cleaned up to accommodate them, that is, as it's already nearing 10k words. I think that the retreat article is currently devoting far too much space to the Greenland/Antarctica glaciers, as that information really should be (and often already is) in the ice sheet articles, and the retreat article needs to only use excerpts/short summaries from those and focus on the mountain glaciers. All the material on Antarctic ice shelves probably belongs in Climate change in Antarctica as well - certainly the case for the Larsen shelves at the Peninsula. InformationToKnowledge (talk) 07:07, 30 January 2024 (UTC)

P.P.S. Did anyone here know that we have an Ice shelf basal channels article? I wouldn't be surprised if you weren't, since it's not even linked on the actual Ice shelf article. Might be the most obvious merge I have seen. There is also the subglacial channel stub, which can probably be reduced to a single paragraph in whichever place will ultimately be explaining glacier dynamics?InformationToKnowledge (talk) 07:14, 30 January 2024 (UTC)

So, can we actually do this now? It's been over a month since the last post here, and nobody seems to oppose the basic idea. InformationToKnowledge (talk) 13:05, 2 March 2024 (UTC)

For merging MISI into this article, I think go for it! Puddlesofmilk (talk) 19:48, 2 March 2024 (UTC)

@Puddlesofmilk, So I merged the two articles at first, and then I ultimately merged about half of the article (content on MISI + boundary conditions and D-O/Heinrich events, mostly) to ice sheet) and moved the other half to Glacier (so that ice flow now redirects to the "Motion" section of Glacier, for instance.)

I think this works rather well, and both articles look fairly good now. Ice sheet in particular seems fairly complete in terms of its coverage by now - I think only the parts on MICI and Heinrich/DO events might need updating, though you may disagree. Glacier is more problematic, mainly because far too many sections there are completely unreferenced. You might be interested in looking at that if you have time. InformationToKnowledge (talk) 09:27, 10 April 2024 (UTC)