Learning about how ice flows and breaks apart in Antarctica is an important part of better understanding how fast sea level rise might be. Now, NASA is tracking how tides influence the ice shelves in Antarctica.
Ice shelves are floating extensions of the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets. With that said, they're not stationary in the water. Instead, this ice rises and falls and even bends with the tides. These motions can eventually cause pieces of ice to break apart.
In order to better understand this motion and how it affects ice shelves, the researchers installed instruments on the Nansen Ice Shelf. This shelf is about 30 miles long and sticks out from the coast of Antarctica.
"Ice shelves are very important for holding back ice flow behind them because what they're essentially doing is acting as a plug; as soon as you remove them, there's nothing there preventing the ice mass from moving quickly down," said Christine Dow, one of the researchers. "It's a particular worry at the moment that the ice shelves around Antarctica are going to break up, and we're going to see an unprecedented speed-up in the ice coming from the center of the ice sheet."
The researchers installed GPS stations in the middle section of the ice shelf, where ice floats freely on ocean water. After collecting the data, the researchers hope to incorporate the measurements into ice sheet models to further study how ocean tides bend ice shelves vertically and affect the flow of ice toward the ocean.
"Examining how the ice shelf responds to tides helps us get at the dynamics of how the ice flows and we're hoping will help with future computer simulations, in particular of where the grounding zone is," said researcher Ryan Walker. "If you're going to be making a model of the system, you want to know everything that you can about it. Actually seeing it gives you a bit more of a feeling for what sort of assumptions you can make, which things are essential and which things are oversimplifications."
The findings could allow researchers to better model ice sheets, which will be huge in the face of ongoing climate change.
