Washington, July 26 (ANI): An international team of researchers has provided the clearest account yet of how much glacial ice surges into the sea following the collapse of Antarctic ice shelves.
The Larsen B ice shelf began disintegrating around January 31, 2002.
Its eventual collapse into the Weddell Sea remains the largest in a series of Larsen ice shelf losses in recent decades, and the international team has documented the continued glacier ice loss in the years following the dramatic event.
"Not only do you get an initial loss of glacial ice when adjacent ice shelves collapse, but you get continued ice losses for many years - even decades - to come," Christopher Shuman, a researcher at UMBC's Joint Center for Earth Systems Technology (JCET) and lead author of the study, said.
Earlier research showed that the recent collapse of several ice shelves in Antarctica led to acceleration of the glaciers that feed into them.
Shuman, Etienne Berthier, of the University of Toulouse, and Ted Scambos, of the University of Colorado, produced detailed ice loss maps from 2001 to 2009 for the main tributary glaciers of the Larsen A and B ice shelves, which collapsed in 1995 and 2002, respectively.
They combined satellite data from NASA and the French space agency CNES, along with measurements collected during aircraft missions similar to ongoing NASA IceBridge flights.
"The approach we took drew on the strengths of each data source to produce the most complete picture yet of how these glaciers are changing," Berthier said.
The authors' analysis shows ice loss in the study area of at least 11.2 gigatons (11.2 billion tons) per year from 2001 to 2006.
Their ongoing work shows ice loss from 2006 to 2010 was almost as large, averaging 10.2 gigatons (10.2 billion tons) per year.
The study was published online July 25 in the Journal of Glaciology. (ANI)
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