Colossal Antarctic Ice-shelf Collapse Followed Last Ice Age
HOUSTON -- (Feb. 18, 2016) -- In a new study that provides clues about how Antarctica's nation-sized Ross Ice Shelf might respond to a warming climate, U.S. and Japanese oceanographers have shown that a 100,000-square-mile section of the ice shelf broke apart within 1,500 years during a warming period after the last ice age.
This infographic depicts a grounded ice sheet (right), floating ice shelf (center) and open sea that is partially covered by ice (left). The isotope beryllium-10 (10Be) forms in the atmosphere …
Rice University students Brian Demet (left) and Ruthie Halberstadt study a seafloor sediment sample aboard the NSF research vessel Nathaniel B. Palmer in the Ross Sea in 2015. Credit: L. …
The Ross Ice Shelf is the world's largest ice shelf, a vast floating extension of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet that is about the size of France. But at the end of the last ice age, it extended much farther north and covered the entire Ross Sea.
A study in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences details how the ice shelf shrank during a period of climate warming following the ice age. The paper was co-authored by Rice University oceanographer John Anderson, postdoctoral research associate Lauren Simkins, graduate student Lindsay Prothro and colleagues at the University of Tokyo.
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