1Effects of Rigid Body Collisions and Tide-Forced Drift on Large Tabular Icebergs of the Antarctic

• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Antarctic; The Antarctic; Weddell; Antarc*; Antarctica; Ice Shelf; Iceberg*
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.477.1712; http://geosci.uchicago.edu/~drm7/research/Icebergs_of_Y2k.pdf

2Abstract. Following the calving of an iceberg from an ice shelf, many collisions between the new iceberg and the remaining shelf can occur as the iceberg responds to time-varying oceanic and atmospheric forcing. Collisions can cause the iceberg to fracture into smaller pieces, initiate calving of other icebergs from the ice shelf, and can induce a mean drift of the iceberg along the remaining ice front. We investigate the effects of iceberg/ice-shelf and iceberg/iceberg collisions using a model that treats icebergs as finite-sized rigid bodies that respond to ocean tidal forcing. We report a detailed study of the calving and drift of giant tabular icebergs in both the Weddell and Ross Seas of Antarctica which calved between October, 1998, and May, 2000. Model performance is assessed using satellite imagery. An interesting feature of the model is the rectification of an iceberg’s tidal motion as a result of collisions. While this feature dominated the model results shown here, it remains to be determined how important tidal processes are relative to non-tidal oceanic and atmospheric processes. From October of 1998 to May of 2000, 5 remarkably large icebergs calved from the