For the first time, a research team co-led by CIRES-based scientists, has directly observed an Antarctic ice shelf bending under the weight of ponding meltwater on top, a phenomenon that may have triggered the 2002 collapse of the Larsen B ice shelf.
For the first time, a research team co-led by CIRES-based scientists, has directly observed an Antarctic ice shelf bending under the weight of ponding meltwater on top, a phenomenon that may have triggered the 2002 collapse of the Larsen B ice shelf. And ice shelf flexure could potentially impact other vulnerable ice shelves, causing them to break up, quickening the discharge of ice into the ocean and contributing to global sea level rise.
“Scientists have been predicting and modeling this process for some time, but nobody has ever collected field data that showed it happening until now,” said Alison Banwell, CIRES postdoctoral visiting fellow and lead author on the new study published today in Nature Communications.
Banwell, formerly at the Scott Polar Research Institute at the University of Cambridge, and her team were inspired to look closer at the causes of ice shelf weakening after analyzing the catastrophic break up of the Larsen B ice shelf. That breakup made headlines in 2002 as 1,250 square miles of ice broke away into the ocean; the scientists noticed that in the months leading up to the breakup, the ice shelf was dotted with over 2000 meltwater lakes.
Read more at University of Colorado at Boulder
Image: Alison Banwell wades through a meltwater lake to retrieve a pressure sensor at the end of the field season. (Credit: Grant Macdonald)
