It's even possible such simulations could lead to glacier surgeries by geo-engineers to drain off melt water, which lubricates and unsticks glaciers. That way they might be able to increase the number of sticky spots and slow down misbehaving ice streams, Stokes said.
He and his colleagues from the United States and Canada have published a review of sticky spot research in the April issue of the journal Earth-Science Reviews.
"We can reasonably well model a normal, well-behaved ice sheet," said Stokes. But the ice streams of most concern are those in Greenland and Western Antarctica that are moving many times faster than their siblings — not normal at all.
"There's been a real evolution of thinking about how the bed of a glacier matters," said glaciologist Sridhar Anandakrishnan of Pennsylvania State University.
For years, ice stream beds had been considered nearly frictionless — devoid of sticky spots.
But then the idea of lumps and bumps, and the role of melt water in lubricating the bed, became better understood, Anandakrishnan explained. Now it appears that an ice stream's speed may be entirely a function of how many sticky spots lie beneath it.
