Totten, Baudouin Ice Shelves In East Antarctica Melting, Contradicting Earlier Projections
EDIT
This on its own would be distressing news for the planet’s coastal communities. But there are also signs that warm water is undercutting at least one of East Antarctica’s other ice shelves. The Totten ice shelf is one of the most important ice shelves in the region. It backstops so much ice that if it were to melt, it would result in up to 12 feet of sea level rise.
Recent research has shown that its geology and interactions with the ocean mean that losing just 4.2 percent of its mass could kickstart the process to send more inland ice to the sea. And it has been melting faster than most other glaciers and ice shelves in East Antarctica. “We knew from satellite data that the Totten has been thinning faster than other glaciers in East Antarctica, but we didn’t know why,” Steve Rintoul, the interim head of CSIRO’s Climate Science Center, said in a statement.
That’s why Rintoul and his colleagues set out to look more closely at the ice in January 2015 on the Aurora Australis, an Australian research boat. They were able to visit the calving front of the ice — where the shelf ends in the ocean — thanks to a fortuitous path that broke in the sea ice in January 2015. It’s the first time direct measurements have ever been taken by boat in the region.
Their findings from that trip, published on Friday in Science Advances, show that the bedrock underlying the ice shelf is a major driver in the melt process. They found two massive ocean channels up to 6 miles wide and a half mile deep are funneling warm water under the ice shelf and melting it out from underneath.
EDIT
http://www.climatecentral.org/news/east-antarctica-melting-climate-change-20986
= new reply since forum marked as read
