How an Antarctic ice shelf slowly collapsed

Embargoed until: Publicly released: 2024-12-03 21:00

Australia; International; TAS

NASA Earth Observatory images by Lauren Dauphin, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey and MODIS data from NASA EOSDIS LANCE and GIBS/Worldview. Story by Kathryn Hansen.

Australian and international scientists have documented the collapse of the Conger–Glenzer Ice Shelf in East Antarctica in 2022, charting its slow collapse over 25 years. The researchers identified four main stages of the ice sheet's retreat that started around 1997 when it became separated from the nearby Shackleton Ice Shelf. It then slowly got smaller and smaller, losing about 10% of its area over the next decade. In 2011, it broke away from a central point that was pinning it, and its ice loss accelerated to 10 times the speed, losing 10% of its area in one year. The remaining parts of the ice shelf then disintegrated over a few days in 2022. The researchers say these observations shed light on the processes involved in an ice sheet's collapse, especially the impacts of ocean and atmospheric warming and extreme weather events.

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Journal/
conference: Nature Geoscience

Research:Paper

Organisation/s: Australian Antarctic Program Partnership (AAPP), Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies (IMAS), University of Tasmania, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, USA

Funder: The work at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution was supported by a NASA Cryosphere grant 80NSSC22K0380 (C.C.W.) and NASA Physical Oceanography grant 80NSSC23K0356 (C.C.W.). The work at the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies was supported through the Australian Government as part of the Antarctic Science Collaboration Initiative programme and an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship (FT230100234, A.D.F.). Contributions to this work were made at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology (A.C. and S.M.), under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Work at the University of California San Diego–Scripps Institution of Oceanography was supported by a NASA ICESat-2 Science Team grant 80NSSC23K0934 (H.A.F., S.A. and C.R.).

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