Antarctic calving loss rivals ice-shelf thinning

• Published in: Nature
• Main Authors: Greene, CA, Gardner, AS, Schlegel, N-J, Fraser, AD
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Nature Publishing Group 2022
• Subjects: Earth Sciences; Physical geography and environmental geoscience; Glaciology; Antarctic; Antarc*; Antarctica; Ice Sheet; Ice Shelf; Ice Shelves
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-05037-w; http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35948639; http://ecite.utas.edu.au/152079

Antarctica's ice shelves help to control the flow of glacial ice as it drains into the ocean, meaning that the rate of global sea-level rise is subject to the structural integrity of these fragile, floating extensions of the ice sheet 1 , 2 , 3 . Until now, data limitations have made it difficult to monitor the growth and retreat cycles of ice shelves on a large scale, and the full impact of recent calving-front changes on ice-shelf buttressing has not been understood. Here, by combining data from multiple optical and radar satellite sensors, we generate pan-Antarctic, spatially continuous coastlines at roughly annual resolution since 1997. We show that from 1997 to 2021, Antarctica experienced a net loss of 36,701+-1,465 square kilometres (1.9 per cent) of ice-shelf area that cannot be fully regained before the next series of major calving events, which are likely to occur in the next decade. Mass loss associated with ice-front retreat (5,874+-396 gigatonnes) has been approximately equal to mass change owing to ice-shelf thinning over the past quarter of a century (6,113+-452 gigatonnes), meaning that the total mass loss is nearly double that which could be measured by altimetry-based surveys alone. We model the impacts of Antarctica's recent coastline evolution in the absence of additional feedbacks, and find that calving and thinning have produced equivalent reductions in ice-shelf buttressing since 2007, and that further retreat could produce increasingly significant sea-level rise in the future.