The landscape hidden under thousands of meters of ice around the South pole remains one of the least known places on Earth. It has, however, a critical impact on the stability of the ice sheet as climate warms. We show here how we accidently developed a new method to determine the shape of the bedrock by combining satellite and airborne data with simple physics: the conservation of mass. We discovered major features, such as the deepest canyon on land on Earth, that have major consequences on the stability of the Antarctic ice sheet and therefore on global sea level rise. Dr. Morlighem received his PhD from Ecole Centrale Paris in 2011 in partnership with the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and is today a Professor of Earth System Science at the University of California Irvine. His research is focused on predicting how much Greenland and Antarctica will contribute to sea level over the next centuries. Dr. Morlighem received several awards, including the 2014 NASA Cryospheric Sciences Most Valuable Player award. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at [ Ссылка ]
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