Ice-Shelf Melting Around Antarctica

By Eric J. M. Rignot, S. Jacobs, Jeremie Mouginot, Bernd Scheuchl. Science, 2013

1,375 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Major Meltdown The ice shelves and floating ice tongues that surround Antarctica cover more than 1.5 million square kilometers—approximately the size of the entire Greenland Ice Sheet. Conventional wisdom has held that ice shelves around Antarctica lose mass mostly by iceberg calving, but recently it has become increasingly clear that melting by a warming ocean may also be important. Rignot et al. (p. 266, published 13 June) present detailed glaciological estimates of ice-shelf melting around the entire continent of Antarctica, which show that basal melting accounts for as much mass loss as does calving. Basal melting of Antarctic ice shelves accounts for as much mass loss as does iceberg calving. We compare the volume flux divergence of Antarctic ice shelves in 2007 and 2008 with 1979 to 2010 surface accumulation and 2003 to 2008 thinning to determine their rates of melting and mass balance. Basal melt of 1325 ± 235 gigatons per year (Gt/year) exceeds a calving flux of 1089 ± 139 Gt/year, making ice-shelf melting the largest ablation process in Antarctica. The giant cold-cavity Ross, Filchner, and Ronne ice shelves covering two-thirds of the total ice-shelf area account for only 15% of net melting. Half of the meltwater comes from 10 small, warm-cavity Southeast Pacific ice shelves occupying 8% of the area. A similar high melt/area ratio is found for six East Antarctic ice shelves, implying undocumented strong ocean thermal forcing on their deep grounding lines.

Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Pulmonary and Respiratory Medicine

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1597eb7e2f9aa9a79d2513e15fc038332a08cb00

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Citations in the corpus

Resolving and Parameterising the Ocean Mesoscale in Earth System Models (2020, background): “The horizontal size of Antarctic ice shelves ranges from the tiny Ferrigno ice shelf (~ 100 km(2)) to the giant Ross ice shelf (~ 500,000 km(2)) [141].”
Evolving Understanding of Antarctic Ice‐Sheet Physics and Ambiguity in Probabilistic Sea‐Level Projections (2017, methodology): “These slightly higher values are driven by the ocean-temperature bias correction, which is needed to improve consistency with observed oceanic sub-ice melt rates in the Amundsen and Bellingshausen Sea sectors of West Antarctica (Rignot et al., 2013).”
Global warming in the pipeline (2022, background): “In a GCM simulation, we added a growing freshwater flux to the ocean surface mixed layer around Greenland and Antarctica, with the flux in the early 21st century based on estimates from in situ glaciological studies [186] and satellite data on sea level trends near Antarctica [187].”