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Glaciology

Beneath a floating ice shelf

Nature Geoscience volume 3, pages 450–451 (2010)Cite this article

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Pine Island Glacier on West Antarctica's Amundsen Sea coast has experienced accelerating retreat over the past few decades. Oceanographic observations under the associated ice shelf show how changes in water flow and ice-cavity geometry have contributed to ice melting.

The West Antarctic Ice Sheet holds enough water to raise global sea levels by several metres. Yet in a warming climate, its future is uncertain. Mass loss occurs mostly through iceberg calving and submarine melting. The floating ice shelves that surround West Antarctica are its main gateways. However, the Archimedes principle dictates that sea level does not respond directly to mass loss from floating ice. Instead, the flow of ice from the grounded ice sheet into the ice shelves controls sea-level rise. This flow is strongly modulated by changes in ice-shelf geometry. Calving and submarine melting can therefore directly increase the rate of grounded-ice loss and sea-level rise. Writing in Nature Geoscience, Jenkins and colleagues1 present direct observations of warm water from the ocean around Antarctica penetrating deeply into the cavity beneath Pine Island Glacier ice shelf, causing widespread and rapid melting of the shelf bottom.

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Figure 1: Schematic ice-shelf retreat.

References

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Christian Schoof is in the Department of Earth and Ocean Sciences, University of British Columbia, 6339 Stores Road, Vancouver, British Columbia V6T 1Z4, Canada. cschoof@eos.ubc.ca,

    Christian Schoof

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  1. Christian Schoof
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Schoof, C. Beneath a floating ice shelf. Nature Geosci 3, 450–451 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo895

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