Climate scientists worldwide are highly concerned about the current level of decline in the ice sheets. The manner in which these ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctic are turning into stream is thought to cause less serious climate concerns, claimed a new study published on Wednesday in the journal Nature.

To conduct the study aimed at understanding the nature of ice stream in regions of Greenland and Antarctic, researchers examined 117 ice streams that appeared throughout the ancient Laurentide Ice Sheet, which melted during a period from around 22,000 to 7,000 years ago. These ice streams were frozen once covering millions of square miles throughout most of the northern region of North America, an area proportionate to area presently occupied by Antarctica.

According to Durham University geology professor, Chris Stokes, they didn’t find any association between major ice sheet instabilities and ice stream activity, rather found that overall number of ice streams decreased and they occupied a progressively smaller percentage of the ice sheet perimeter. This means that thousand years of deglaciation was caused by melting of the surface.

The bigger variable affecting the sheets' deglaciation, surface melt, is still unknown. “Stokes and colleagues find that ice-stream activity decreased as the planet warmed, there is still a lot we don’t know about how these ice streams behave, understanding their behavior is crucial for accurate modeling of future ice sheet decline”, said Jason Briner, an associate geology professor at the University at Buffalo, in response to the research paper.

The study results pointed out that there is lees danger of declining ice sheets as thought before. These are unlikely to get depleted in thousands of years. The ice streams are seen as unstable entities that can accelerate ice-sheet deglaciation.