The iceberg calved from the Conger Ice Shelf in East Antarctica. A Sentinel-1A image of the iceberg C-38 taken on March 17, 2022. But in recent decades, scientists have seen several large ice shelves undergoing total disintegration. The breaking and detachment of parts of ice shelves is a natural process: ice shelves generally go through cycles of slow growth punctuated by isolated calving events. Instead, most of the continent loses ice through calving and melting along the underside of the floating ice shelves. Little of the Antarctic ice sheet melts at its surface, where snow piles up. Ice shelves are sometimes referred to as the “safety band” of Antarctica because they buttress the upstream flow of ice from the bordering ice sheet. When an ice shelf like Conger is lost, the grounded ice once kept behind the shelf may start to flow faster as the restraining force of the ice shelf is lost, resulting in more ice tumbling into the ocean. By restraining how much the grounded ice flows upstream, they can control the loss of ice from the interior of the sheet into the ocean. Smaller ice shelves are found where continental ice meets the sea in Greenland, northern Canada and the Russian Arctic. The world’s largest ice shelves fringe Antarctica, extending its ice sheet into the frigid Southern Ocean. Two calving events on March 5 and 7 reduced it further, detaching it from Bowman and precipitating its final collapse a week later. Since the beginning of satellite observations in the 1970s, the tip of the shelf had been disintegrating into icebergs in a series of what glaciologists call calving events.Ĭonger was already reduced to a 50km-long and 20km-wide strip attached to Antarctica’s vast continental ice sheet at one end and the ice-covered Bowman Island at the other. The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research.Įast Antarctica’s Conger ice shelf-a floating platform the size of Rome-broke off the continent on March 15, 2022.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |