Because of their light weight, strength and high melting point, ceramics are now incorporated into such military items as helicopter armor and parts in rocket guidance systems.

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And the strength, lightness, high melting point and ability to resist corrosion of titanium make it an ideal material for building aircraft parts, supercars and medical implants but it can cost 50 times as much as steel.

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That would mean a very high probability of all of Greenland melting.

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During the accumulation season, sublimation is reduced because of a low gradient of vapour pressure and the energy supplied by radiation is directly consumed by melting, explaining why discharge is high.

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But this is now changing, with oil firms increasingly heading north, nudged by high oil prices, better technology, a dearth of easier opportunities and melting ice.

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In the high altiplano, poor peasants depend for much of their water on the slow melting of snow.

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For a number of reasons, computer models with added atmospheric carbon dioxide preferentially warm the mid-and high-latitude land areas of the northern hemisphere that are ice-free, which also enhances summer melting of the relatively shallow ice in the Arctic Ocean.

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Glaciers in monsoonal climates, unlike high-latitude glaciers, gain mass from precipitation during the same warm season in which they lose mass from melting, which makes their behaviour complex.

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