Thwaites & Pine Island Glaciers Speeding Up By 1.5 Km/Yr; Amundsen Sea Shelf Thinning @ 6 Meters/Yr

[hatrack]

EDIT

In West Antarctica, ice shelves are being eaten away by warm ocean water, and those in the Amundsen and Bellingshausen seas are up to 18 per cent thinner than in the early 1990s. At the Antarctic Peninsula, where air temperatures have risen sharply, ice shelves have collapsed as their surfaces have melted. Altogether, 34,000 km2 of ice shelf area has been lost since the 1950s.

"Although breakup of the ice shelves does not contribute directly to sea-level rise—since ice shelves, like sea ice, are already floating—we now know that these breakups have implications for the inland ice: without the ice shelf to act as a natural buffer, glaciers can flow faster downstream and out to sea," said Professor Helen Amanda Fricker, a glaciologist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego.

More than 150 studies have tried to determine how much ice the continent is losing. The biggest changes have occurred in places where ice shelves—the continents protective barrier—have either thinned or collapsed. In the Amundsen Sea, for example, ice shelf thinning of up to six metres per year has triggered a 1.5 km per year acceleration of the Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers. These glaciers have the potential to raise sea levels by more than a metre, and are now widely considered to be unstable.

Satellite observations have meanwhile provided an increasingly detailed picture of the sea ice cover, allowing us to map the extent, age, motion and thickness of the ice. The combined effects of climate variability, atmosphere and ocean circulation, and even ice shelf melting have driven regional changes, including reductions in sea ice in the Amundsen and Bellingshausen seas.

EDIT

https://phys.org/news/2018-06-satellites-track-antarctic-ice.html

[sinkingfeeling]

1. Breaks my heart to read this about Antarctica.