(a) The repeat flight path of the 2002 and 2009 Operation IceBridge (OIB) campaigns, with the letters S-S′, P-P′ and K-K′ marking the endpoints of the profiles in Figs 2, 3, 4. Colour scale shows bottom ice elevation changes at crossover locations of non-repeating OIB tracks between the years 2009 and 2014. At each crossover location, the bottom elevation of the earlier year is subtracted from that of the latter, hence positive values indicate bottom ice loss. The differences found are then averaged over the length of the time interval to facilitate comparisons. Uncertainty varies between ∼35 m per year for the 1-year interval to ∼7 m per year for the 5-year interval (Methods). Grounding lines are from refs 13 and 19, and background image is from the 2008–2009 MODIS Mosaic of Antarctica50 (MOA). (b) The study area of Fig. 1a located on a map of the ASE region by the white rectangle showing the flight paths analysed here of the 2002 and 2009 OIB campaigns, and the 2004 AGASEA campaign along the Smith-Kohler glacier trunk. (c) Surface lowering rates for the period 2003–2009 adapted from ref. 1. The authors used ICESat-1 measurements with the necessary corrections, with ATM and other data products applied as additional constraints to the surface shape and elevation time series. Graphic: Khanzendar, et al., 2016 / Nature Communications

By Eric Roston
25 October 2016 (Bloomberg) – If you want to see the future of New York, Tokyo, or Mumbai, look no further than West Antarctica, where a warmer sea is turning ice into water that may be headed to your doorstep. The bottom of the world has drawn increased scrutiny from scientists over the last few years, as West Antarctic ice loss in some places shows signs of becoming “unstoppable.” There’s enough water locked up in West Antarctica’s Amundsen Sea region alone to raise the global average sea level by four feet, and it’s the fastest-melting spot on the continent. The National Science Foundation and a U.K. counterpart last week announced that they’ll fund up to $25 million in research that will help the scientific community better understand the timing and mechanics of a critical glacier, the Thwaites. It’s basically the climate-science equivalent of an FBI “Most Wanted” poster. A study issued on Tuesday in Nature Communications measures directly just how dramatically glaciers are being gnawed at from beneath. The research focuses on those that empty into a section of the Amundsen Sea just south of the Thwaites Glacier. A significant portion of Antarctica is now subject to “intense unbalanced melting,” the authors write. [more]

West Antarctica Begins to Destabilize With ‘Intense Unbalanced Melting’ (a) Surface elevation change between 2002 and 2009 as measured by ATM laser altimetry on the across-flow Smith Glacier (SG) transect delimited by S-S′ shown in Fig. 1a. (b) The 2002 and 2009 ice surface and bottom MCoRDS profiles of SG along the transect delimited by S-S′ in Fig. 1a. The hydrostatic floatation levels were found by taking freeboard elevation to be 0.12 of ice thickness, which was inferred from floating ice in Figs 3b and 4b; and taking sea surface to be at −33.9 m relative to the WGS84 ellipsoid, which was found from ATM 2009 measurements of ocean surface height in front of the Dotson Ice Shelf. The 2002 ice bottom appears partially dotted at some locations due to the lower density of available measurements there. (c) Ice surface and bottom along-flow profiles following the entire 2004 AGASEA trajectory shown in Fig. 1b. In this and subsequent figures the vertical grey lines mark grounding line locations. The 1996 grounding line location is taken as the origin of the x axis representing the distance along the flight path, and is indicated by a shorter grey line when bed topography is not available at its location. Graphic: Khanzendar, et al., 2016 / Nature Communications

By Carol Rasmussen and Maria-Jose Vinas
25 October 2016 (JPL) – Two new studies by researchers at NASA and the University of California, Irvine (UCI), detect the fastest ongoing rates of glacier retreat ever observed in West Antarctica and offer an unprecedented direct view of intense ice melting from the floating undersides of glaciers. The results highlight how the interaction between ocean conditions and the bedrock beneath a glacier can influence the glacier’s evolution, with implications for understanding future ice loss from Antarctica and global sea level rise. The two studies examined three neighboring glaciers in West Antarctica that are melting and retreating at different rates. Smith, Pope and Kohler glaciers flow into the Dotson and Crosson ice shelves in the Amundsen Sea Embayment in West Antarctica, the part of the continent with the largest loss of ice mass. A study led by Bernd Scheuchl of UCI, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters on Aug. 28, used radar measurements from the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-1 satellite and data from the earlier ERS-1 and ERS-2 satellites to look at changes in the glaciers’ grounding lines — the boundary where a glacier loses contact with bedrock and begins to float on the ocean. The grounding line is important because nearly all glacier melting takes place on the underside of the glacier’s floating portion, called the ice shelf. If a glacier loses mass from enhanced melting, it may start floating farther inland from its former grounding line, just as a boat stuck on a sandbar may be able to float again if a heavy cargo is removed. This is called grounding line retreat. Scheuchl’s team found a rapid retreat of Smith Glacier’s grounding line of 1.24 miles (2 kilometers) per year since 1996. Pope retreated more slowly at 0.31 mile (0.5 kilometer) per year since 1996. Kohler, which had retreated at a slower pace, actually readvanced a total of 1.24 miles (2 kilometers) since 2011. These differences motivated Ala Khazendar of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California — a coauthor of Scheuchl’s study — to measure the ice losses at the bottoms of the glaciers, which he suspected might be underlying the changes in their grounding lines. Khazendar’s study, published Oct. 25 in the journal Nature Communications, used measurements of changes in the thickness and height of the ice from radar and laser altimetry instruments flown by NASA’s Operation IceBridge and earlier NASA airborne campaigns. Radar waves penetrate glaciers all the way to their base, allowing direct measurements of how the bottom profiles of the three glaciers at their grounding lines changed between 2002 and 2014. Laser signals reflect off the surface, so for the floating ice shelves, laser measurements of changes in surface elevation can be used to infer changes in ice thickness. Previous studies using other techniques estimated the average melting rates at the bottom of Dotson and Crosson ice shelves to be about 40 feet per year (12 meters per year). Khazendar and his team, using their direct radar measurements, found stunning rates of ice loss from the glaciers’ undersides on the ocean sides of their grounding lines. The fastest-melting glacier, Smith, lost between 984 and 1,607 feet (300 and 490 meters) in thickness from 2002 to 2009 near its grounding line, or up to 230 feet per year (70 meters per year). Those years encompass a period when rapid increases in mass loss were observed around the Amundsen Sea region. The regional scale of the loss made scientists strongly suspect that an increase in the influx of ocean heat beneath the ice shelves must have taken place. “Our observations provide a crucial piece of evidence to support that suspicion, as they directly reveal the intensity of ice melting at the bottom of the glaciers during that period,” Khazendar said. “If I had been using data from only one instrument, I wouldn’t have believed what I was looking at, because the thinning was so large,” Khazendar added. However, the two IceBridge instruments, which use different observational techniques, both measured the same rapid ice loss. Khazendar said Smith’s fast retreat and thinning are likely related to the shape of the underlying bedrock over which it was retreating between 1996 and 2014, which sloped downward toward the continental interior, and oceanic conditions in the cavity beneath the glacier. As the grounding line retreated, warm and dense ocean water could reach the newly uncovered deeper parts of the cavity beneath the ice shelf, causing more melting. As a result, “More sections of the glacier become thinner and float, meaning that the grounding line continues retreating, and so on,” he said. The retreat of Smith might slow down as its grounding line has now reached bedrock that rises farther inland of the 2014 grounding line. Pope and Kohler, by contrast, are on bedrock that slopes upward toward the interior. The question remains whether other glaciers in West Antarctica will behave more like Smith Glacier or more like Pope and Kohler. Many glaciers in this sector of Antarctica are on beds that deepen farther inland, like Smith’s. However, Khazendar and Scheuchl said researchers need more information on the shape of the bedrock and seafloor beneath the ice, as well as more data on ocean circulation and temperatures, to be able to better project how much ice these glaciers will contribute to the ocean in a changing climate. Scheuchl’s study is titled “Grounding Line Retreat of Pope, Smith, and Kohler Glaciers, West Antarctica, Measured with Sentinel-1a Radar Interferometry Data.” It was published in Geophysical Research Letters. Khazendar’s paper, titled “Rapid Submarine Ice Melting in the Grounding Zones of Ice Shelves in West Antarctica,” was published in Nature Communications. NASA collects data from space, air, land and sea to increase our understanding of our home planet, improve lives and safeguard our future. NASA develops new ways to observe and study Earth’s interconnected natural systems with long-term data records. The agency freely shares this unique knowledge and works with institutions around the world to gain new insights into how our planet is changing.

Contact

Alan Buis
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California
818-354-0474
Alan.Buis@jpl.nasa.gov
Written by Carol Rasmussen and Maria-Jose Vinas
NASA Earth Science News Team

Studies Offer New Glimpse of Melting Under Antarctic Glaciers

ABSTRACT: Enhanced submarine ice-shelf melting strongly controls ice loss in the Amundsen Sea embayment (ASE) of West Antarctica, but its magnitude is not well known in the critical grounding zones of the ASE’s major glaciers. Here we directly quantify bottom ice losses along tens of kilometres with airborne radar sounding of the Dotson and Crosson ice shelves, which buttress the rapidly changing Smith, Pope and Kohler glaciers. Melting in the grounding zones is found to be much higher than steady-state levels, removing 300–490 m of solid ice between 2002 and 2009 beneath the retreating Smith Glacier. The vigorous, unbalanced melting supports the hypothesis that a significant increase in ocean heat influx into ASE sub-ice-shelf cavities took place in the mid-2000s. The synchronous but diverse evolutions of these glaciers illustrate how combinations of oceanography and topography modulate rapid submarine melting to hasten mass loss and glacier retreat from West Antarctica.

Rapid submarine ice melting in the grounding zones of ice shelves in West Antarctica