Ice-Shelf Melting Around Antarctica
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.
Abstract
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.
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Supplementary Material
Summary
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Figs. S1 to S4
Tables S1 and S2
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References and Notes
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Volume 341 | Issue 6143
19 July 2013
19 July 2013
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Copyright © 2013, American Association for the Advancement of Science.
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Received: 29 January 2013
Accepted: 31 May 2013
Published in print: 19 July 2013
Acknowledgments
We thank three anonymous reviewers for their constructive criticism of the manuscript. This work was performed at the University of California, Irvine, and at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under grants from NASA’s Cryospheric Science Program and Operation IceBridge (OIB) and at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University under grants from the National Science Foundation and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
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