Evolution of ice-shelf channels in Antarctic ice shelves

• Main Author: Drews, Reinhard
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: 2015
• Subjects: Géographie physique; Antarctic; Buttress; Roi Baudouin; Antarc*; Antarctica; Ice Shelf; Ice Shelves; The Cryosphere
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2013/ULB-DIPOT:oai:dipot.ulb.ac.be:2013/200143; https://dipot.ulb.ac.be/dspace/bitstream/2013/200143/3/Drews2015b.pdf; https://dipot.ulb.ac.be/dspace/bitstream/2013/200143/4/doi_183770.pdf

Ice shelves buttress the continental ice flux andmediate ice–ocean interactions. They are often traversed bychannels in which basal melting is enhanced, impacting iceshelfstability. Here, channel evolution is investigated using atransient, three-dimensional full Stokes model and geophysicaldata collected on the Roi Baudouin Ice Shelf (RBIS),Antarctica. The modeling confirms basal melting as a feasiblemechanism for channel creation, although channels mayalso advect without melting for many tens of kilometers.Channels can be out of hydrostatic equilibrium dependingon their width and the upstream melt history. Inverting surfaceelevation for ice thickness using hydrostatic equilibriumin those areas is erroneous, and corresponding observationalevidence is presented at RBIS by comparing the hydrostaticallyinverted ice thickness with radar measurements. Themodel shows that channelized melting imprints the flow fieldcharacteristically, which can result in enhanced horizontalshearing across channels. This is exemplified for a channelat RBIS using observed surface velocities and opens up thepossibility to classify channelized melting from space, an importantstep towards incorporating these effects in ice–oceanmodels. SCOPUS: ar.j info:eu-repo/semantics/published