Abstract
THE Ross Ice Shelf (Fig. 1) is a sheet of ice that floats over 540,000 km2 of the Ross Embayment1. The ice in the southern part is between 300 and 800 m thick, and floats on as much as 400 m of water2,3. Until now any knowledge of the water mass beneath the shelf has been inferred from studying the open water of the Ross Sea far to the north. Here, I describe a newly discovered natural access to seawater beneath the Ross Ice Shelf, 550 km south of the shelf front and 770 km from the South Pole, on the north-eastern margin of an ice rise.
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BARRETT, P. Seawater near the head of the Ross Ice Shelf. Nature 256, 390–392 (1975). https://doi.org/10.1038/256390a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/256390a0
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