Shelf ice. Medical search. Frequent questions

Unlike ice shelves in Antarctica and Greenland that are fed by massive glaciers, the Ayles Ice Shelf was comprised of compacted, thickened sea ice. (nasa.gov)
Breakup of Larsen B Ice Shelf, Antarctica. (carleton.edu)
They found that western Antarctica has in recent years seen warmer, saltier water being driven under the shelf - the part of the ice sheet that sticks out over the ocean. (newscientist.com)
Most freshwater on earth is bound in the huge ice shield covering almost entire Antarctica and extending in shelf-ice to the sea. (grida.no)
The Filchner-Ronne ice shelf in the southern Weddell Sea is roughly the size of Sweden, and thus the second-largest ice shelf in Antarctica. (awi.de)
Computer simulations of AWI oceanographers have now shown, however, that with the increasing warming in Antarctica the sea ice formation in the southern Weddell Sea will decrease - and thus the salt content of the cold water. (awi.de)
An ice shelf the size of New York City has collapsed in East Antarctica, an area long thought to be stable and not hit much by climate change, concerned scientists said Friday. (latimes.com)
The overall effect of climate change around East Antarctica is it's chipping away at the edges of the ice sheets in some places, but it's actually adding more snow to the middle. (latimes.com)
On Antarctica, meltwater ponds riddle a kilometer-thick, 10,000-year-old ice shelf, which shatters just weeks later. (sciencedaily.com)
Overall, the study concludes that more abundant and accurate data is needed to enable better predictions of ice shelf loss in Antarctica, as the ultimate goal of their work is to improve observations of the processes that contribute to sea level rise, said Chartrand. (scienceblog.com)
Total ice shelf volume (mean thickness multiplied by ice shelf area) across Antarctica changed very little from 1994 to 2003, then declined rapidly, the study shows. (phys.org)
Under current rates of thinning, the researchers estimate the ice shelves restraining the unstable sector of West Antarctica could lose half their volume within the next 200 years. (phys.org)
Satellite video shows the ice shelf holding the Pine Island Glacier in Antarctica back from the sea is breaking up much faster than before. (wcpo.com)
Also in Antarctica, east of the Amudsen Sea, the Larsen C ice shelf is on the verge of separating from the continent, The New York Times reported last week. (undispatch.com)
Scientists have discovered a huge inverted canyon under an ice shelf in Antarctica, which might cause its demise much quicker than expected. (iflscience.com)
Using the ESA's CryoSat satellite and the Copernicus Sentinel-1 mission, researchers looked at the Dotson ice shelf in West Antarctica. (iflscience.com)
This rare event, chronicled in a study published today in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, occurred during the 2019 Antarctic winter on Amery Ice Shelf in East Antarctica, and it is estimated that 600-750 million cubic meters (21-26 billion cubic feet) of water, about twice the volume of San Diego Bay, were lost to the ocean. (ucsd.edu)
Knowing exactly how, and how much, ice is being lost from these protective floating shelves is a key step in understanding how Antarctica is evolving," said University of Colorado ice scientist Ted Scambos, who wasn't part of the study. (wgntv.com)
Experts have found that El Nino, which is characterized by unusually warm ocean temperatures in the Equatorial Pacific, is causing the melting of ice shelves in the Antarctica. (donga.com)
For most of the ten larger ice shelves in Antarctica, a gradual (but accelerating) increase of basal melt rates during the 21st century is a robust feature throughout the various realizations. (awi.de)
Warmer surface temperatures during summers can cause more ice on Antarctica ice shelves to melt into standing water ponds, then leak into cracks and increase the odds of collapse, according to a new study published by an American team of scientists. (colorado.edu)
Warmer summer temperatures on the much larger Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica could have severe repercussions because that ice shelf is part of the "braking system" for some very large glaciers, Scambos said. (colorado.edu)
Computer models have suggested that when it gets warm enough for water to pool on ice shelves, such as those around Antarctica, the weight - up to 2 million tons - will depress the ice beneath. (iflscience.com)
With three-quarters of Antarctica bordered by ice shelves, their survival is essential to keeping the rate of land ice melt, and therefore sea level rise, to something we can manage. (iflscience.com)
It is one of the biggest in Antarctica and, for the past century, the massive Wilkins ice shelf appeared to have escaped the ravages of global warming. (priceofoil.org)

This will allow scientists to more accurately forecast the fate of the remaining ice shelves and better predict the contribution of Antarctica's ice sheet to sea level rise, as climate changes. (newswise.com)
Satellite photos show the area had been shrinking rapidly the last couple of years, and now scientists wonder whether they have been overestimating East Antarctica's stability and resistance to global warming that has been melting ice rapidly on the smaller western side and the vulnerable peninsula. (latimes.com)
Fish, amphipods and jellyfish are among the creatures discovered in the cold, dark world under Antarctica's Ross Ice Shelf by researchers with the Whillans Ice Stream Subglacial Access Research Drilling (WISSARD) project. (livescience.com)
Feb. 25, 2021 Antarctica's northern George VI Ice Shelf experienced record melting during the 2019-2020 summer season compared to 31 previous summers of dramatically lower melt, a new study found. (sciencedaily.com)
Even the most minute changes to Antarctica's ice shelves could pose a significant threat to coastal communities, Chartrand said, as a few inches of significantly displaced ice shelf could cause thicker ice to flow into the ocean and potentially cause some coastlines to retreat several feet. (scienceblog.com)
A new study led by Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego researchers has revealed that the thickness of Antarctica's floating ice shelves has recently decreased by as much as 18 percent in certain areas over nearly two decades, providing new insights on how the Antarctic ice sheet is responding to climate change. (phys.org)
Today's Image of the Day from NASA Earth Observatory features a large iceberg that has broken away from Antarctica's Brunt Ice Shelf. (earth.com)
Researchers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California and the University of California, Irvine, have discovered an ice process that may have caused a Delaware-size iceberg to break off Antarctica's immense Larsen C ice shelf in the Southern Hemisphere winter of 2017. (yubanet.com)
Ice shelves, the floating tongues of glaciers that extend over the ocean, slow the rate at which Antarctica's glaciers contribute to global sea level rise. (yubanet.com)

These included the abrupt and rapid losses of 1600 square kilometres of ice from the Larsen A Ice Shelf in 1995, 3320 square kilometres from the Larsen B Ice Shelf in 2002, and 1450 square kilometres from the Wilkins Ice Shelf in 2009. (newswise.com)
The peninsula is the fastest-warming region in the Antarctic and has seen some of the largest temperature rises on earth - 0.5C per decade - which is why the Wilkins ice shelf is on the verge of disappearing completely, said one of the scientists. (priceofoil.org)
I read an article today that indicates how one of the largest ice-shelfs in the antarctic region is in danger of collapse: Photo From ESA The Wilkins Ice Shelf is experiencing further disintegration that is threatening the collapse of the ice bridge connecting the shelf to Charcot Island. (duanestorey.com)
The media has been blabbing on about how the Wilkins Ice Shelf is in imminent danger of disintegration because of global warming for years. (qohel.com)
Of course, the Wilkins Ice Shelf will collapse someday, maybe someday soon. (qohel.com)
Except that when the Wilkins Ice Shelf does collapse, it could be for any number of reasons . (qohel.com)

Earlier this year, two papers revealed that several glaciers on the West Antarctic ice sheet seemed to be on an unstoppable retreat into the sea and will collapse completely in the next 200 to 1000 years, raising sea levels by about 60 centimetres. (newscientist.com)
Because the glaciers help to stabilise the ice sheet, that could mean the whole sheet is doomed, causing around 4 metres of sea-level rise. (newscientist.com)
While ice shelf disintegration doesn't directly raise sea level because they are already floating, the resulting acceleration of the tributary glaciers behind the ice shelf, into the Southern Ocean, does. (newswise.com)
The ice shelf, about 460 square miles wide holding in the Conger and Glenzer glaciers from the warmer water, collapsed between March 14 and 16, said ice scientist Catherine Walker of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. (latimes.com)
We need to know how stable each one of the ice shelves are because once one disappears" it means glaciers melt into the warming water and "some of that water will come to San Diego and elsewhere. (latimes.com)
Ice is added to the ice shelf by glaciers flowing off the continent and by snowfall that compresses to form ice. (phys.org)
If this process continues until enough of an ice shelf breaks off (as with Larsen B in 2002 ), the glaciers that the shelf was holding back begin flowing more rapidly from the land into the sea. (yubanet.com)
Climate warming is the underlying cause for this change of ice-shelf behavior, because it has raised the temperatures of both the air above and the ocean water beneath the glaciers. (yubanet.com)
Four dozen Antarctic ice shelves have shrunk by at least 30% since 1997 and 28 of those have lost more than half of their ice in that time, reports a new study that surveyed these crucial "gatekeepers'' between the frozen continent's massive glaciers and open ocean. (wgntv.com)
That melted ice, which usually pens larger glaciers behind it, then goes into the sea. (wgntv.com)
Ice shelves are floating extensions of glaciers that act "like the gatekeepers" and keep the larger glacier from flowing more quickly into the water, the study's lead author said. (wgntv.com)
The Wordie ice shelve, which holds back four glaciers near the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula, had a big collapse in 1989, but has lost 87% of its remaining mass since 1997, Davison found. (wytv.com)
International Symposium on Contribution of Glaciers and Ice Sheets to Sea Level Change, 26 May 2014 - 30 May 2014, Chamonix, France. (awi.de)
Furthermore, ice shelves often act as plugs, blocking glaciers' flow to the sea. (iflscience.com)
From melting glaciers into the ocean which is slowly adding to the increased momentum of the ice shelves. (aw-daily.com)

Copland said that attributing the shelf collapse to human-caused global warming would be premature, although the shelf's quick demise was a sign that warming temperatures are producing rapid changes in the Arctic. (nasa.gov)
Larsen B Ice Shelf Collapse. (nasa.gov)
The seemingly inevitable collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet and the associated sea-level rise are happening faster than previously thought. (newscientist.com)
This is like the 'straw that broke the camel's back', triggering the runaway collapse of large areas of ice shelves weakened by pre-existing fracturing and decades of surface flooding. (newswise.com)
In only a matter of days, the collapse of the Larsen B Ice Shelf in 2002 removed an area of ice shelf that had been in place for the previous 11 500 years. (newswise.com)
The collapse, captured by satellite images, marked the first time in human history that the frigid region had an ice shelf collapse. (latimes.com)
The issue isn't the amount of ice lost in this collapse, Neff and Walker said. (latimes.com)
The collapse shocks scientists and unleashes the glacier behind the ice shelf, driving up sea level. (sciencedaily.com)
Dangers to ancient Antarctic ice portend a future of rapidly rising seas, but a new study may relieve one nagging fear: that ponds of meltwater fracturing the ice below them could cause protracted chain reactions that unexpectedly collapse floating ice shelves. (sciencedaily.com)
There is a speed limit in the study that shows that an ice shelf can't collapse ridiculously fast," said co-author Alison Banwell, a glaciology researcher at the University of Colorado Boulder. (sciencedaily.com)
That worries scientists because the large glacier protected by the shelf could collapse sooner than the centuries they had predicted. (wcpo.com)
The hydrofracture process has been implicated in the collapse of smaller ice shelves in the Antarctic Peninsula, where meltwater forms on the surface of ice shelves during austral summer, but it is not often seen driving through ice as thick as the 1400 meters (4,590 feet) at this location on Amery Ice Shelf. (ucsd.edu)
Since surface meltwater on ice shelves can cause their collapse which ultimately leads to sea-level rise when grounded ice is no longer held back, it's important to understand the processes that weaken ice shelves. (ucsd.edu)
Meltwater lakes on ice shelves cause the ice nearby to twist under the water's weight, hastening the shelves' collapse. (iflscience.com)
The retreat of the Larsen B ice shelf, Antarctic Peninsula, and the collapse of its northern section are analyzed using satellite images acquired between January 1995 and May 2003. (awi.de)
This rapid collapse occurred at the end of an exceptionally warm summer, and after a multi-year period of decreasing surface net mass balance, ice thinning, flow acceleration and widening of rifts. (awi.de)
Professor Vaughan was a member of a BAS team that predicted in 1993 that the Wilkins Shelf could collapse within 30 years, if the pace of global warming continued. (priceofoil.org)
If these two factors were not present, it is very unlikely that the ice shelf would be facing a collapse. (aw-daily.com)
If the ice shelf were to collapse, it would release enough pressure to force the iceberg into the ocean. (aw-daily.com)

The top image shows the area before the ice shelf breakup, and the bottom image shows the area after the breakup. (nasa.gov)
Writing on his Website, Luke Copland, director of the University of Ottawa's Laboratory for Cryospheric Research, said, "This [breakup] reduced the remaining ice shelves there from 6 to 5, and continues a trend of dramatic loss of these ice shelves over the past century. (nasa.gov)
The Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer ( ASTER ) on NASA's Terra satellite observed the area before and after the ice shelf breakup. (nasa.gov)
She added, "Multiple hydrofracture chains originating in different areas of an ice shelf could also lead to a larger-scale ice shelf breakup. (sciencedaily.com)
After analyzing images of the Larsen Ice Shelf over the past two decades, he deduced the years with the longest duration of surface meltwater corresponded to the years of major shelf breakup events. (colorado.edu)
This would cause massive flooding as the warmer ocean currents would rush to fill the gap created by the breakup of the ice. (aw-daily.com)

The effects CDW has on melting of Antarctic ice shelves, along with other mechanisms contributing to warm air and water circulation, are generally understood though they are poorly modeled with consistency. (eurekalert.org)

Newswise - Storm-driven ocean swells have triggered the catastrophic disintegration of Antarctic ice shelves in recent decades, according to new research published in Nature today. (newswise.com)
Each disintegration event occurred during periods when sea ice was significantly reduced or absent, and when ocean waves were large. (newswise.com)
Removal of the ice shelf buttressing effect also caused a 3- to 8-fold increase in the discharge of glacial ice, behind the shelf, into the ocean, in the year following disintegration. (newswise.com)
Antarctic Ice shelf disintegration triggered by sea ice loss and ocean swell. (newswise.com)
The findings provide a solid link between climate warming and the recent extensive disintegration of some Antarctic ice shelves," said Scambos. (colorado.edu)

Comparison of sea-ice formation and the currents below the Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf today and in the future. (awi.de)
Both with HadGem2 and with MPI-ESM forcing, basal melt rates for the Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf in FESOM increase by a factor of two by the end of the 21st century in the RCP85 scenario. (awi.de)

It's more than five times the ice in the more vulnerable West Antarctic Ice Sheet, where scientists have concentrated much of their research. (latimes.com)
Scientists had been seeing this particular ice shelf - closest to Australia - shrink a bit since the 1970s, Neff said. (latimes.com)
The scientists are the first to punch through an Antarctic ice shelf into the grounding zone, where these thick, floating ice layers leave land and transition to the sea. (livescience.com)
Scientists say the crumbling of the shelf, captured on time-lapse satellite video, is triggered by climate change. (wcpo.com)
The finding that mélange - a mixture of windblown snow, iceberg bits, and sea ice lodged in and around ice shelves - is critical in holding ice shelves together implies that the these ice shelves may break up even faster than scientists had expected due to rising air temperatures. (yubanet.com)
Scientists have suggested that freeze-and-thaw cycles of meltwater pooling on top of the ice are making the rifts grow. (yubanet.com)
A global team of scientists including several from Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego discovered the sudden demise of a large, deep, ice-covered lake on the surface of an Antarctic ice shelf. (ucsd.edu)
Scientists count huge melts in many protective Antarctic ice shelves. (wgntv.com)
Of the continent's 162 ice shelves, 68 show significant shrinking between 1997 and 2021, while 29 grew, 62 didn't change and three lost mass but not in a way scientists can say shows a significant trend, according to a study in Thursday's Science Advances. (wgntv.com)
While scientists have known that meltwater fills crevasses and enlarges the cracks, this is the first study to explain the physics linking ice-shelf viability and meltwater ponds. (colorado.edu)
The extra outward pressure of the water counteracts the internal pressure holding the ice together, according to the scientists' conclusions. (colorado.edu)
A thin strip of ice is all that now prevents the Wilkins shelf from disintegrating and breaking away from the landmass of the Antarctic peninsula, scientists said yesterday. (priceofoil.org)
This break-up is puzzling to scientists because it has occurred in the Southern Hemispheric winter and does not have characteristics similar to two earlier events that occurred in 2008, which were comparable to the break-up of the Larsen-A and -B ice shelves. (duanestorey.com)

Increasing melt of Antarctic ice would lead to significant sea level rise. (grida.no)

An ice shelf is a thick platform of ice that forms at the grounding line of a glacier, where the glacier meets the coastline. (grida.no)
This water can cut through the base of ice shelves rapidly, leading to "cavities", or cleaves in a glacier due to warm water currents. (eurekalert.org)
According to a study published in the Friday, June 11, 2021 issue of Science Advances, the critical Antarctic glacier is looking more vulnerable as satellite images show the ice shelf that blocks it from collapsing into the sea is breaking up much faster than before and spawning huge icebergs. (wcpo.com)
As a glacier's ice shelf flows out over the Southern Ocean, it eventually snags on an island, undersea ridge, or the wall of the bay that encloses the glacier. (yubanet.com)
first, using the assumption of constant temperature and density with depth, and secondly, using realistic data and profiles for Erebus Glacier tongue and for the Amery ice shelf. (nerc.ac.uk)
For Erebus Glacier tongue the shear stress is at most 5% of the magnitude of the direct stress deviators and its action through the ice shell should result in differential movement of 1.8 cm a−1 between the top and bottom of the ice shelf. (nerc.ac.uk)
Massive chunks of ice afloat the oceans adjoining the Antarctic Continent, ice shelves are dubbed as the "struts of the Antarctic glacier. (donga.com)
The biggest loss of all is in the Thwaites ice shelf, holding back the glacier nicknamed Doomsday because it is melting so fast and is so big. (wytv.com)
the frontal position of an ice shelf is an important parameter for ice dynamic modelling, the computation of mass fluxes, mapping glacier area change, calculating iceberg production rates and the estimation of ice discharge to the ocean. (dlr.de)

According to Chartrand, she and her co-author, Ian Howat , a glaciologist and a Distinguished University Scholar in earth sciences at Ohio State , first began to investigate ice shelf thickness when examining basal channels - channels in which warmer ocean water melts grooves into the bottom of the ice shelf, accelerating mass loss - during a previous study. (scienceblog.com)
Here, I focus on the turbulence characteristics, boundary layer structure, and melt rate as thermal driving and ice-shelf basal slope vary. (cam.ac.uk)
I consider commonly-used parameterizations of ice-shelf melting and show that the melt rate scales approximately linearly with thermal driving, as parameterized, but mixing efficiency increases with basal slope, which is not parameterized. (cam.ac.uk)
Simulations of ice-shelf basal melting in future climate scenarios from the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) have revealed a large uncertainty and the potential of a rapidly increasing basal mass loss particularly for the large cold-water ice shelves in the Ross and Weddell Seas. (awi.de)
We find that inclusion of observed basal crevasses and density dependent ice stiffness can greatly alter the flexure profile and yet fitting a simple elastic beam model to that profile will still produce an excellent fit. (northumbria.ac.uk)

The years 2002 through 2005 were unusually warm in the Arctic, and 2005 was marked by a strong decline in Arctic sea ice. (nasa.gov)
Acquired August 18, 2010, and August 22, 2002, these natural-color images show changes on the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf on Canada's Ellesmere Coast. (nasa.gov)
Still, massive increases in surface melting due to unusually warm weather can trigger catastrophic ice shelf collapses like that of the iconic shelf "Larsen B," which shattered in 2002. (sciencedaily.com)
Banwell's models indicate bending in parts of the shelf, while nearby areas were unmoved, could have caused the 2002 break up of 3,250 square kilometers (1,250 square miles) of the Larsen B Ice Shelf. (iflscience.com)
Over 1 week during March 2002, after a period of steady retreat since 1995, 2300 km2 of the ice shelf broke up into many small icebergs. (awi.de)
The ice-shelf area decreased from 11 512 km2 in January 1995 to 3463 km2 in March 2002, and 2667 km2 in April 2003. (awi.de)
In addition, the recent changes of grounded and residual floating ice north of Larsen B are analyzed by means of Envisat advanced synthetic aperture radar (ASAR) images up to summer 2003, showing significant loss of grounded ice upstream of those ice-shelf sections which disintegrated in 1995 and 2002. (awi.de)

On Monday, the Nature Geoscience reported that based on the analysis of satellite observations from 1994 to 2017, a team of researchers led by Fernando S. Paolo, a postdoc researcher at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, found that an influx of warm ocean water from El Nino caused a dramatic melting of ice shelves of the Amundsen Sea. (donga.com)
The shelf has lost 70% of its mass since 1997 - about 4.1 trillion tons (3.7 trillion metric tons) - into the Amundsen Sea. (wytv.com)

A new study puts damage by meltwater ponds to ice shelves and the ensuing threat to sea level into cool, mathematical perspective. (sciencedaily.com)

The ice shelf was roughly 66 square kilometers (25 square miles), slightly larger than Manhattan, New York, or 11,000 football fields. (nasa.gov)
The Dotson ice shelf has an area of about 3,500 square kilometers (1,350 square miles) and is between 300 and 490 meters (1,000 and 1,600 feet) thick. (iflscience.com)
After drainage, in place of the lake, there was a crater-like depression in the ice shelf surface, covering about eleven square kilometers (4.25 square miles). (ucsd.edu)

Researchers surmised that while progress in learning the mechanisms in which oceanic warming is affecting the AIS is occurring, there needs to be improvement and innovation to assess where the continued melting of ice shelves in the Antarctic will leave humanity in the future. (eurekalert.org)
Researchers suggest priorities are made, starting with improving cavity geometry, bathymetry (measuring the depth of water) and future projections of the mass balance of ice sheets. (eurekalert.org)
Dec. 22, 2022 Researchers have discovered a process that can contribute to the melting of ice shelves in the Antarctic. (sciencedaily.com)
By juxtaposing vast datasets of 20 of the 300 total separate ice shelf systems that surround about 75% of the Antarctic ice sheet , researchers from The Ohio State University found that on average, the Antarctic ice shelves are nearly 6% thinner than previous studies had assumed, a difference of about 17 meters. (scienceblog.com)
Merging data from three overlapping missions, the researchers identified changes in ice thickness that took place over more than a decade, an advancement over studying data from single missions that only provide snapshots of trends. (phys.org)
While melting ice shelves do not contribute directly to sea-level rise, the researchers indicate that there is an important indirect effect. (phys.org)
The researchers modeled the entire Larsen C ice shelf using NASA's Ice-sheet and Sea-level System Model with observations from NASA's Operation IceBridge and European and NASA satellites. (yubanet.com)
Now, possible increased flows into deep, ice-covered lakes and hydrofracture of thick ice shelves should also be considered in projections for future warming, said researchers. (ucsd.edu)
But the recent research shows the summertime temperatures on the Larsen Ice Sheet are just a few degrees below what the researchers believe is the threshold for surface "ponding" and subsequent ice-cracking events. (colorado.edu)

Over time, this flexing enlarges pre-existing fractures until long thin 'sliver' icebergs break away or 'calve' from the shelf front. (newswise.com)
Ice is lost when icebergs break off the ice front, and by melting in some regions as warm water flows into the ocean cavity under the ice shelf. (phys.org)
When the shelf breaks up, it spawns icebergs 5 miles long and 22 miles wide, then those break into smaller ones. (wcpo.com)
Cracks deepen into rifts that cut through the shelf from top to bottom and widen across, finally releasing icebergs into the ocean. (yubanet.com)
ERS synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images were used to identify ice-shelf zones with different surface morphology, which generated icebergs of different sizes and shapes. (awi.de)

The low ice levels are certainly in line with a planet that is rapidly warming - 2014, 2015 and 2016 each broke global temperature records - but the Arctic is warming even faster than the rest of the world. (undispatch.com)
The rift that produced the iceberg rapidly advanced across the ice shelf during the summer of 2020 to 2021. (earth.com)
But in recent decades, ice shelves in the Antarctic Peninsula have been moving and disintegrating more rapidly. (yubanet.com)
New research shows that the Antarctic ice shelves are rapidly thinning, revealing an eighteen percent decrease in thickness over the course of roughly 20 years. (scitechdaily.com)

Since the connection to the island in the image centre helps to stabilise the ice shelf, it is likely the break-up of the bridge will put the remainder of the ice shelf at risk. (duanestorey.com)

As global ice dams begin to weaken due to warming temperatures, a new study suggests that prior attempts to evaluate the mass of the huge floating ice shelves that line the Antarctic ice sheet may have overestimated their thickness. (scienceblog.com)
If the ice shelves continue to weaken at this rate. (aw-daily.com)

Meltpools on the surface of ice shelves don't get all that deep, as can be seen by Dr Alison Banwell wading through one, but their weight can cause ice shelves hundreds of meters high to flex under the weight. (iflscience.com)

The warmer water comes from the deep and is pushed up under the ice shelf by changing wind patterns, some of which are in turn driven by global warming . (newscientist.com)
The closest station to the collapsed ice shelf is Australia's Casey station, about 180 miles away and it hit 42 degrees, which was about 18 degrees warmer than normal. (latimes.com)
The ice shelves that grew were predominantly on the continent's east side, where there's a weather pattern isolates the land from warmer waters, Davison said. (wytv.com)
Antarctic expeditions described water pooling on ice shelves more than a century ago, but warmer temperatures are seeing it happen more often, meaning other shelves could soon follow Larsen B. (iflscience.com)

Fricker, who has explored a different more stable East Antarctic ice shelf, said an ice shelf there "is the quietest most serene place you can imagine. (latimes.com)
Earlier gains in East Antarctic ice shelf volume ceased after about 2003, the study showed. (phys.org)

Schematic diagram of an Antarctic ice shelf showing the processes causing the volume changes measured by satellites. (phys.org)
Here, we present IceLines, a novel data set on antarctic ice shelf front positions to assess calving front change at an unprecedented temporal and spatial resolution. (dlr.de)

And, she adds, they are a step towards developing a better understanding of the physics of ice shelves and towards making better climate-change projections. (newscientist.com)
The contribution of the Antarctic Ice Sheet is currently the greatest source of uncertainty in projections of global mean sea level rise," Dr Bennetts said. (newswise.com)
In recent decades with rising air temperatures, some ice shelves have experienced greater surface melting, and the most recent model projections for future warming show that trend continuing and creating more melt lakes. (ucsd.edu)
I close with some perspectives on using coarse-resolution models for ice-shelf melt projections. (cam.ac.uk)

citation needed] Because of the uneven surface and possible air holes throughout shelf ice, the ice may give way unexpectedly. (wikipedia.org)

The cold temperatures freeze small areas of the open lake, forming float ice. (wikipedia.org)
We need to monitor the summertime temperatures to see what the future holds for these ice sheets," said Hulbe. (colorado.edu)
While some areas of the Antarctic have warmed by as much as 4.5 Fahrenheit in the past 50 years, few records have been kept of seasonal temperatures over ice shelves, she said. (colorado.edu)

The discovery comes after the international research team, from Australia, the United States and New Zealand, combined satellite images and surface and ocean wave data with modelling, to analyse five major ice shelf disintegrations, between 1995 and 2009. (newswise.com)
The Larsen Ice Sheet experienced major retreats in 1995 and 1998, including more than 775 square miles that disintegrated during a January 1995 storm. (colorado.edu)
The melt season during the 1995 Larsen Ice Sheet retreat was more than 80 days long - about 20 days longer than average. (colorado.edu)

Ice shelves fringe about three quarters of the Antarctic coast and they play a crucially important role in moderating sea level rise by buttressing and slowing the movement of glacial ice from the interior of the continent to the ocean. (newswise.com)
An ice sheet forms through the accumulation of snowfall, in this case on the Antarctic continent, when annual snowfall exceeds annual snowmelt. (newswise.com)

The ledge can become very thick depending on the size of the ice pieces and the size of the air pockets. (wikipedia.org)
Over thousands of years the layers of snow build up and compact, forming a sheet of ice up to thousands of metres thick and thousands of kilometres across. (newswise.com)
This may seem like a small shift in scale, but typical ice shelves can be anywhere from 50 to 600 meters thick. (scienceblog.com)
She found that depending on the internal strength of the ice, water-filled crevasses as shallow as 15 feet could fracture through a 660-foot-thick ice shelf. (colorado.edu)

Since shelves are already suffering from thinning, these deepening canyons mean that fractures are likely to develop and the grounded ice upstream will flow faster than would be the case otherwise. (iflscience.com)

This work demonstrates the power of satellite observations to understand change in the great polar ice sheets," said Thomas Wagner, Program Manager for Cryospheric Sciences at NASA Headquarters. (phys.org)
An autonomous underwater vehicle with long range and the capability of navigating beneath ice shelves will make formerly impossible observations in two key WAIS ice shelves. (gu.se)
Satellite observations of melted water on the ice surfaces provide important clues to the water pressure theory, said Fannestock. (colorado.edu)
Observations of boundary-layer processes and ice crystal behaviour in an outflow region from the Ross/McMurdo Ice Shelves are presented. (copernicus.org)

The data sets will be interpreted based on theoretical bounds for heat flux into the ice shelf cavities, developed in parallel. (gu.se)

It's not clear how these canyons form, but it appears they are having a dramatic effect on the shelf - and this only adds to sea-level rise, as inland ice flows faster into the ocean. (iflscience.com)

Currently there are not nearly enough ponds on any ice shelf for a repeat of Larsen B, but much meltwater is weighing on ice shelves and contributing damage to them," said Banwell, who helped pioneer hydrofracture research on ice shelves. (sciencedaily.com)
We believe the weight of water accumulated in this deep lake opened a fissure in the ice shelf beneath the lake, a process known as hydrofracture, causing the water to drain away to the ocean below," said study lead author Roland Warner, a glaciologist with the Australian Antarctic Program Partnership at the University of Tasmania. (ucsd.edu)

A study Friday shows the ice shelf has shrunk by one-fifth since 2017. (wcpo.com)

Also involved in the study were Dr Ted Scambos of the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado Boulder, Dr Sharon Stammerjohn of the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research at the University of Colorado Boulder, and Prof. Vernon Squire of the University of Otago. (newswise.com)
Led by Ted Scambos of the University of Colorado at Boulder, the team focused on the Larsen Ice Sheet on the Antarctic Peninsula. (colorado.edu)
A paper on the subject by Scambos and Jennifer Bohlander of the University of Colorado-headquartered National Snow and Ice Data Center, Mark Fahnestock of the University of Maryland and Christine Hulbe of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., appeared in the January issue of the Journal of Glaciology. (colorado.edu)
The result implies that other ice shelves are closer to the breaking point than we previously thought," said Scambos. (colorado.edu)

Unfortunately, the disappearance of ice shelves does have two indirect, but very large, effects on ocean height. (iflscience.com)

But if that's the case, how could Larsen C release its giant iceberg in winter, when the ice had been frozen solid for months? (yubanet.com)
FILE - This Nov. 10, 2016 photo released by NASA, shows a rift in the Antarctic Peninsula's Larsen C ice shelf. (wgntv.com)
The largest of the Larsen ice shelves, Larsen C, has lost 1.8 billion tons (1.7 trillion metric tons) of ice, about one-eighth of its mass. (wytv.com)
NASA's Hulbe used a computer model to simulate the thermodynamics of part of the Larsen Ice sheet before and after the 1990 retreat events to assess if meltwater "wedges" could split a crevasse to the bottom of the ice sheet. (colorado.edu)

These topographical subtleties help with understanding the transport of CDW and how coastal currents, surface winds, and bottom pressure torque all play into the interactions of these warm water currents with glacial masses and ice sheets. (eurekalert.org)
It is exciting to see ICESat-2 show us details of processes that are occurring on the ice sheet at such fine spatial scale," said co-author Helen Amanda Fricker, a glaciologist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography who has long studied active sub-glacial lakes, discovering them in 2007. (ucsd.edu)

Since each piece of ice developed independently, each is of a different thickness, creating variations in strength, density, and depth. (wikipedia.org)
The research, recently published in the Journal of Glaciology , is the first large-scale study of its kind to compare ice shelf thickness data from ice-penetrating radar measurements to thickness data estimated from contemporary surface elevation measurements. (scienceblog.com)
The study concludes that while prior assumptions about the ice shelves' thickness were correct on a large scale, their accuracy varied greatly on a small scale, such as for individual structures like valleys or crevasses that are either too narrow or too small to be measured accurately. (scienceblog.com)
One of the largest discrepancies the study found was that the assumptions used to estimate ice shelf thickness in previous research sometimes exaggerated ice shelf thickness in some areas, and at other times understated it. (scienceblog.com)
What this research really shows is that we need to be a lot more careful about the assumptions we make to estimate the ice shelf thickness, and about how we account for uncertainties and what they mean for the final result," she said. (scienceblog.com)
Eighteen years of change in thickness and volume of Antarctic ice shelves. (phys.org)
Scripps graduate student Fernando Paolo, Scripps glaciologist Helen Amanda Fricker, and oceanographer Laurie Padman of Earth & Space Research (a non-profit institute specializing in oceanography research) constructed a new high-resolution record of ice shelf thickness based on satellite radar altimetry missions of the European Space Agency from 1994 to 2012. (phys.org)

Data from an outbreak of listeriosis linked to milkshakes made from ice cream produced in 1 factory showed that contaminated products were distributed widely to the public without any reported cases, except for 4 cases of severe illness in persons who were highly susceptible. (cdc.gov)

Here we use density, radar and DInSAR measurements in combination with full-Stokes viscoelastic modelling to investigate a range of additional controls on the flexure of the Southern McMurdo Ice Shelf. (northumbria.ac.uk)

This translucent fish, about 8 inches (20 centimeters) long, lives under nearly 2,500 feet (740 meters) of permanent ice that is roughly 530 miles (850 kilometers) from the open ocean. (livescience.com)
The channel is up to 200 meters (650 feet) deep in places and runs the entire length of the Dotson ice shelf. (iflscience.com)
Instead, the model showed that simply thinning the ice shelf without changing the mélange actually closed the rifts, with average widening rates dropping from 259 to 72 feet (79 to 22 meters) per year. (yubanet.com)
Visualization of 600-750 million cubic meters lost to the ocean with the demise of the ice-covered lake. (ucsd.edu)
The ice surface fell as much as 80 meters (260 feet) in the doline cavity, even though the loss of the water load made the floating ice shelf lighter and ocean pressure caused it to flex upwards, with the lake's immediate surroundings rising as much as 36 meters (118 feet). (ucsd.edu)

It's difficult to connect an individual ice shelf loss directly to human-caused climate change, but steady attrition is expected as the world warms, he said. (wytv.com)

An amphipod recovered from seawater under the Ross Ice Shelf. (livescience.com)
A geothermal probe begin lowered into the borehole on the Ross Ice Shelf. (livescience.com)
WISSARD drilling camp at the Ross Ice Shelf grounding zone. (livescience.com)
The shelf retreats that have occurred so far have had few consequences for sea-level rise, but breakups in some other areas like the Ross Ice Shelf could lead to increases in ice flow off the Antarctic and cause sea level to rise. (colorado.edu)

And consequently on the amount of ice floating above the Arctic Ocean. (aw-daily.com)
Testing and advancing the proposed chronology of late Quaternary sediments in this part of the Arctic is essential to better constrain the timing of ice sheet growth on the Siberian Arctic shelf and subsequent ice shelf development in the Arctic Ocean. (lu.se)

All told, Antarctic ice shelves lost about 8.3 trillion tons (7.5 trillion metric tons) of ice in the 25-year period, the study found. (wgntv.com)

This increases the risk of widespread hydrofracturing, which could lead to ice shelves collapsing, permitting faster discharge of ice from grounded ice sheets and increases in sea level. (ucsd.edu)

The Glenzer Conger ice shelf presumably had been there for thousands of years, and it's not ever going to be there again," said University of Minnesota ice scientist Peter Neff. (latimes.com)
A lot of people thought intuitively, if you thin the ice shelf, you're going to make it much more fragile and it's going to break," explained Eric Larour, a JPL scientist and lead author of the new study. (yubanet.com)

They modeled what happened to these rifts if only the ice shelf grew thinner because of melting, if only the mélange grew thinner, and if both grew thinner. (yubanet.com)

What then happens is shown by our two infographics: How the warmth of the ocean attacks the ice shelf. (awi.de)
Lead author Dr Rob Massom, of the Australian Antarctic Division and the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Cooperative Research Centre, said that reduced sea ice coverage since the late 1980s led to increased exposure of ice shelves on the Antarctic Peninsula to ocean swells, causing them to flex and break. (newswise.com)
Sea ice acts as a protective buffer to ice shelves, by dampening destructive ocean swells before they reach the ice shelf edge," Dr Massom said. (newswise.com)
But where there is loss of sea ice, storm-generated ocean swells can easily reach the exposed ice shelf, causing the first few kilometres of its outer margin to flex. (newswise.com)
Study co-author Dr Luke Bennetts, from the University of Adelaide's School of Mathematical Sciences, said the finding highlights the need for sea ice and ocean waves to be included in ice sheet modelling. (newswise.com)
Our study underlines the importance of understanding the mechanisms driving these sea ice trends, particularly in regions where sea ice acts as a protective buffer against ocean processes," he said. (newswise.com)
The ice shelves buttress the flow from grounded ice into the ocean, and that flow impacts sea-level rise, so that's a key concern from our new study," said Fricker. (phys.org)
Fricker said future studies will concentrate on the causes behind changes in ice shelf volume, including the effects of the atmosphere and ocean. (phys.org)
For one, when the ocean is exposed, rather than covered by ice, it absorbs energy from the sun rather than reflecting it back into the atmosphere. (undispatch.com)
The team thinks that these channels are being created by ocean circulation under the shelf, a process that has been sustained for at least 25 years. (iflscience.com)
Melt from Dotson ice shelf results in 40 billion tonnes [44 billion US tons] of freshwater being poured into the Southern Ocean every year, and this canyon alone is responsible for the release of 4 billion tonnes [4.4 billion US tons] - a significant proportion," Dr Gourmelen said in a statement . (iflscience.com)
Large-eddy simulations have been a fruitful tool for studying ocean turbulence in the ice ocean boundary layer of sea ice and ice shelves. (cam.ac.uk)
In this study, we used large-eddy simulations to examine the ice-shelf ocean boundary layer in a regime in which shear controls the rate of melting, modulated by stable stratification. (cam.ac.uk)
Projected heat fluxes and thus sea-ice formation over the Southern Ocean continental shelves have converged to an ensemble with a much smaller spread than between the AR4 experiments. (awi.de)

So any Antarctic ice-cap loss associated with this process is likely underestimated," he concludes. (newscientist.com)
Spending time investigating small-scale processes may also provide valuable information leading to better future models being developed, and critically, determining what the mass loss of the AIS means for atmospheric, oceanic, and sea ice circulations. (eurekalert.org)
Study co-author, Dr Phil Reid, from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, said the research identifies a previously under-appreciated link between sea ice loss and ice shelf stability. (newswise.com)
Then in 2020, the shelf's ice loss sped up to losing about half of itself every month or so, Walker said. (latimes.com)
West Antarctic ice shelves lost ice throughout the entire observation period, with accelerated loss in the most recent decade. (phys.org)
That may ultimately allow us to improve our models for predicting future ice loss. (phys.org)
What's most important, he said, are the patterns of individual shelf loss. (wgntv.com)
Reference: "Volume loss from Antarctic ice shelves is accelerating" by Fernando S. Paolo, Helen A. Fricker and Laurie Padman, 26 March 2015, Science . (scitechdaily.com)
Refreezing come winter makes no difference, but if an opening drains the lake, the sudden weight loss should raise the shelf beneath. (iflscience.com)
Thus, the use of EO as a sedative in the water used to transport silver catfish can delay the loss of freshness and the deterioration of whole fish stored in ice. (bvsalud.org)

Because ice cream has a long shelf life and L. monocytogenes does not grow but survives for long periods in frozen products ( 3 ), the level of L. monocytogenes in implicated products manufactured during the outbreak, although collected after the outbreak, was likely to be representative of levels in products eaten by exposed persons. (cdc.gov)
The fact that you could put a coin in a vending machine and get a packet of soy milk with a long shelf life made him think. (lu.se)

Schmidtko's team combined a range of data sets measuring seawater properties such as salinity - which drops when ice melts nearby - and temperature at different locations and depths, going back to 1975. (newscientist.com)

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer ( MODIS ) on NASA's Terra satellite captured these images of the ice shelf on August 13, 2005. (nasa.gov)
This trio of images from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA's Terra satellite shows the rapid break up of the Serson Ice Shelf between July 28 and July 31. (nasa.gov)
I would not have thought that this rift could go zipping across the northeast side of the Brunt Ice Shelf and cause a significant calving - all in a tiny fraction of the time it has taken Chasm 1 to extend toward the ice rumples from the south," said Christopher Shuman, a glaciologist based at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. (earth.com)

Is vertical shear in an ice shelf negligible? (nerc.ac.uk)
Doake, C.S.M. . 1979 Is vertical shear in an ice shelf negligible? (nerc.ac.uk)
Vertical shear stress in ice shelves cannot be precisely zero, since the upper and lower surfaces are generally not parallel. (nerc.ac.uk)
For the Amery ice shelf, the shear stress is at most 0.4% of the magnitude of the direct stress deviators and this should lead to differential movement of 2.5 cm a−1 between the top and bottom of the ice shelf. (nerc.ac.uk)
Shear stresses are therefore generally negligible in comparison with direct stress deviators and can be ignored when considering the overall dynamics of ice shelves. (nerc.ac.uk)

In this paper, we identify key multiscale oceanic processes that are responsible for heat delivery to the bases of the Antarctic ice shelves and review our current understanding of these processes," said Zhaomin Wang, professor and first author of the study. (eurekalert.org)
The existence and settlement of this scale of crystal has implications for understanding SIPL evolution and the processes controlling the fate of Ice Shelf Water. (copernicus.org)

According to NASA, A-74 broke from the ice shelf northeast of the McDonald Ice Rumple - an area where the flow of ice is impeded by an underwater formation that causes pressure waves, crevasses, and rifts to form at the surface. (earth.com)
They first assessed which of the hundreds of rifts in the ice shelf were most vulnerable to breaking, selecting 11 rifts for in-depth analysis. (yubanet.com)

Created by the wind and waves, the shelf ice is a jumble of ice chunks, pushed onto each other. (wikipedia.org)

They discovered that a melt pond hydrofracturing the ice shelf can prompt neighboring ponds to do the same. (sciencedaily.com)
Ponds are used as part of a soil and water conservation program to water livestock, as an irrigation water source, and for fire protection and recreation, such as fishing, boating, swimming, and ice skating. (cdc.gov)

On August 13, 2005, the remote Ayles Ice Shelf on Ellesmere Island in northern Canada broke free and began drifting out to sea. (nasa.gov)
and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), the ice shelf broke free in less than an hour. (nasa.gov)

Data from nearly two decades of satellite missions have shown that the ice volume decline is accelerating, according to a study published on March 26, 2015, in the journal Science and supported by NASA. (phys.org)

These ideas are all theoretical, however, and we've discovered recently our understanding of the behavior of large quantities of ice is often not all that good. (iflscience.com)

Wordie is barely an ice shelf anymore. (wgntv.com)

Anatomy4

Organisms12

Diseases3

Chemicals and Drugs9

Analytical, Diagnostic and Therapeutic Techniques and Equipment5

Psychiatry and Psychology2

Phenomena and Processes25

Disciplines and Occupations4

Anthropology, Education, Sociology and Social Phenomena3

Technology, Industry, Agriculture14

Humanities1

Information Science4

Health Care18

Geographicals7

Antarctica25

Antarctica's9

Wilkins Ice S6

Glaciers15

Collapse19

Breakup6

Melting of Antarctic ice shelves1

Disintegration5

Filchner-Ronne2

Scientists13

Melt of Antarctic ice1

Glacier9

Basal5

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Amundsen Sea2

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Researchers9

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Warmer4

East Antarctic2

Antarctic ice shelf2

Projections4

Citation1

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Continent2

Thick4

Grounded ice upstream1

Observations4

Cavities1

Flows1

Hydrofracture2

Shrunk1

Scambos4

Disappearance1

Larsen4

Glacial2

Thickness7

Outbreak of listeriosis linked1

Measurements1

Meters5

Climate-change1

Ross Ice S4

Arctic Ocean2

Trillion metric tons1

Discharge1

Scientist2

Thinner1

Ocean14

Loss10

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Shear5

Processes2

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NASA1

Behavior of large1

Wordie1