“We thought it would take a long time to see any kind of climate impacts in Antarctica. That’s not really true,” Mottram said, adding that some of the early warnings came from scientists who saw collapsing ice shelves, retreating glaciers, and increased surface melting in satellite data.
He said one early warning sign was the rapid collapse of the ice shelf along the narrow Antarctic Peninsula, which extends north toward the tip of South America. Helen Amanda Frickerprofessor of geophysics at Scripps Institution of Oceanography Polar center At the University of California, San Diego.
The remains of sea ice stuck along the Antarctic Peninsula are a reminder that much of the ice on the frozen continent around Antarctica is as vulnerable to global warming as the ice in the Arctic, where long-term thawing is underway.
Credit: Bob Berwin/Inside Climate News
After a series of warm summers created cracks and meltwater pools in the Rhode Island-sized sheet of floating ice, it collapsed almost overnight. The old, thick ice dam disappeared, and the seven major glaciers behind it accelerated toward the ocean, raising sea levels as the ice melted.
“the Larsen B ice shelf collapse “2002 was an amazing event in our community,” said Fricker, who was not an author on the new paper. “We couldn’t believe the pace at which it happened, in the space of six weeks. Basically, the ice shelves are there and then, boom, boom, boom, a series of melt streams and melt pools. And then it all collapsed, scattered into little pieces.”
She said glaciologists never expected events would happen so quickly in Antarctica.
Same physics, same changes
Glaciologists had thought about changes in Antarctica on millennium timescales, but the collapse of the ice shelf showed that extreme warming could lead to much faster change, Fricker said.
Current research focuses on the edges of Antarctica, where floating sea ice and relatively narrow glaciers slow the flow of the ice sheet toward the sea. The Antarctic ice sheet is described as a giant ice reservoir contained by a series of dams.