Twenty-five years of satellite observations have been used to reconstruct a detailed history of Antarctica’s ice shelves. These ice platforms are the floating protrusions of glaciers flowing off the land, and ring the entire continent. The European Space Agency data-set confirms the shelves’ melting trend. As a whole, they’ve shed close to 4,000 gigatons since 1994 – an amount of meltwater that could all but fill America’s Grand Canyon.
But the innovation here is not so much the fact that the shelves are losing mass – we already knew that; relatively warm ocean water is eating their undersides. Rather, it’s the finessed statements that can now be made about exactly where and when the wastage has been occurring, and where also the meltwater has been going. “For example, there’ve been a couple of studies that showed that including the effect of Antarctic ice melt into models slows global ocean temperature rise, and that can actually lead to an increase in precipitation in the US,” explained Susheel Adusumilli from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego.
“We see that melting is always above the steady state values,” Mr Adusumilli told BBC News. “You need some amount of melting just to keep the ice sheet in balance. But what we’ve seen is an amount of melting by the ocean that is more than is needed to keep it in balance.” The fascinating aspect to this study is that the scientists can also now trace precisely where at depth the melting is occurring. Some of these floating platforms of ice (the biggest is the size of France) extend many hundreds of metres below the sea surface.
Source: BBC
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