Change in Antarctic Ice Shelf Area from 2009 to 2019 ...

• Main Authors: Andreasen, Julia R., Hogg, Anna E., Selley, Heather L.
• Format: Dataset
• Language: English
• Published: Zenodo 2023
• Subjects: Antarctica; Ice Shelf; Remote Sensing; Calving Front; Antarctic; The Antarctic; Antarctic Peninsula; East Antarctica; West Antarctica; Ronne Ice Shelf; Antarc*; Ice Sheet; Ice Shelves
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7830050; https://zenodo.org/record/7830050

Antarctic Ice Shelves provide buttressing support to the ice sheet, stabilising the flow of grounded ice and its contribution to global sea levels. Over the past 50-years satellite observations have shown ice shelves collapse, thin and retreat, however, there are few measurements of the Antarctic wide change in ice shelf area. Here, we use MODIS satellite data to measure the change in ice shelf calving front position and area on 34 ice shelves in Antarctica, from 2009 to 2019. Over the last decade, a reduction in area on the Antarctic Peninsula (6,692.5 km2) and West Antarctica (5,563.1 km2), has been outweighed by area growth in East Antarctica (3,532.1 km2) and the large Ross and Ronne-Filchner Ice Shelves (14,027.9 km2). The largest retreat was observed on Larsen-C Ice Shelf where 5,916.6 km2 of ice was lost during an individual calving event in 2017, and the largest area increase was observed on Ronne Ice Shelf in East Antarctica, where gradual advance over the past decade (535.3 km2/yr) led to a 5,888.6 ...