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Crevasse analysis reveals vulnerability of ice shelves to global warming

An ingenious combination of satellite imaging, machine learning and stress analysis has revealed the Antarctic ice shelves that are most at risk of disintegrating as a result of atmospheric warming.
  1. Jeremy N. Bassis

    1. Jeremy N. Bassis is in the Department of Climate and Space Sciences, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109, USA.

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In 2002, a large part of the Larsen B ice shelf — one of the freely floating platforms of ice that surround the Antarctic ice sheet — disintegrated in less than six weeks. This allowed the glaciers that previously fed it to flow more quickly to the ocean1. Neither the speed nor the timing of the disintegration was predicted by ice-sheet models used to project future sea-level rise. Glaciologists have spent the past two decades looking at the aftermath of ice-shelf disintegrations, to learn lessons that will help them predict which ice shelf will be the next to fall, and how this will contribute to the discharge of grounded ice to the ocean2,3. Writing in Nature, Lai et al.4 report progress in this area. The authors combined simple theories of fracture formation with machine-learning techniques to determine which portions of an ice shelf are most vulnerable to break-up and most likely to lead to sustained drawdown of the grounded ice sheet on collapse.

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Nature 584, 527-528 (2020)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-02422-1

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