Reading Task

Ice Melt Clues to Future Climate

Name: _______________________ Date: ______________

In the following text, the headings of five sections have been removed. Choose the best heading
(A-F) for the five sections (1-5). There is one extra heading you do not need to use.
Write the letter on the lines.

A. Old Ice Clues

B. History Repeating Itself
C. Fear For The Future
D. Super Fast Melt
E. Accurate Predictors
F. Fresh Input

When the climate began to warm during the last Ice Age about 23,000 years ago, much of the Northern
Hemisphere was covered in ice.
In two new studies published this week in Nature Geoscience, researchers describe how ice sheets
behaved in the past could help scientists better predict what might happen to them in a warmer world of
our future.

1. ____
University of Wisconsin geologist Anders Carlson studies ice sheet melt from land and ocean sediment
cores. His study describes what prehistoric Earth was like in North America and Northern Europe some
140,000 years ago.
"What we found in this paper was that ice that's resting on land it responded very quickly to the warming
climate, but then it didn't retreat really rapidly. It kind of chugged along and slowly melted like an ice cube
if you put a hair dryer on it," Carlson says, adding that was not the case with ice sheets floating on the
ocean. "Marine based ice sheets behave unpredictably. They may not do anything for a while, and then
they all of a sudden respond very abruptly. They can rapidly disappear."

2. ____
Greenland and Antarctica hold the Earth's last remaining ice sheets. In July, satellite data showed that
97 percent of the surface of the Greenland ice sheet had turned to slush over four days, a rate faster
than at any time in recorded history. According to Carlson, it might be responding rapidly to small
changes in temperature, similar to what he saw in the prehistoric record of ice sheets on land.
"But that said, they haven't catastrophically collapsed in the past either to rapidly raise sea level in the
time scale that humans would care about, that we would be hard pressed to adapt to." Carlson says the
Antarctic marine-based ice sheet is less predictable. "What this would say from the past is that these ice
sheets, well they may not do anything for a bit. But then if you want to catastrophically raise sea level like
on the orders of a meter or two in human lifetime, there is prehistoric precedent for that happening."

3. ____
A second paper in Nature Geoscience looks back 12,000 to 7,000 years to when massive ice sheets still
covered the high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere. At that time, the global climate was roughly
comparable to what it is today and glaciers were melting.
The study describes abrupt sea level jumps - from one-half to two meters -from melting glaciers.

4. ____
"What happens when you suddenly drain these massive amounts of fresh water into the ocean? It's
going to change ocean circulation," says co-author Torbjorn Tornqvist, an Earth scientist at Tulane
University in Louisiana.
Today, rapid melting from the Greenland ice sheet would send massive amounts of fresh water into the
North Atlantic Ocean, changing the marine environment.
 Reading Task
Ice Melt Clues to Future Climate
"But it will also lead to potentially higher precipitation rates in the same region, which could also lead to
fresher surface waters in the North Atlantic," Tornqvist says. "So we need to understand whether those
types of changes could potentially be capable of triggering these kinds of abrupt climate events."

5. ____
Tornqvist adds that understanding how abrupt climate changes affected Earth's geologic past can help
design climate models that can better predict the future.

Read the article again and write TRUE (T) OR FALSE (F) next to each sentence.

6. The climate started to get warmer more than 20 thousand years ago. ____
7. Scientists can predict how the climate might behave in the future based on past research. ____
8. A study carried out in Europe shows that ice sheets never melted hundred thousand years ago. ____
9. The ice on land and ice sheets on the oceans behave differently. ____
10. It had taken about four days to melt almost all the ice sheets in Antarctica. ____
11. There is no evidence that the sea level can raise one or two meters. ____
12. The global climate at present is very similar to the climate some ten thousand years ago. ____
13. A scientist claims that great quantities of water poured into oceans might change their behavior.
____
14. The melting of the Greenland ice sheet wont affect in any way the marine life in the Atlantic Ocean.
____
15. This melting will also provoke more rain, which will refresh the ocean water. ____