The Antarctic ice sheet, which represents the largest of all potential contributors to sea level rise, appears to be losing mass at a rate that has accelerated over recent decades.
Ice loss is focussed in a number of key drainage basins where dynamical changes in the outlet glaciers have led to increased discharge. The synchronous response of several independent glaciers, coupled with the observation that thinning is most rapid over their floating termini, is generally taken as an indicator that the changes have been driven from the ocean. The deeper parts of the Amundsen Sea continental shelf are flooded by Circumpolar Deep Water (CDW) with a temperature around 1ºC, which potentially drives rapid melting of the floating ice.
Over the years, a few research cruises ventured in this remote area to try and understand key mechanisms at play in every disciplines of Earth Sciences. Many questions remain unanswered. This project tries to create a large database of all ocean-relevant observations in an attempt to shed light on ocean dynamics and its impacts on the climate system. Please contact my collaborators or myself if you would like to participate to this effort.
This work is done in collaboration with :
Adrian Jenkins, Deb Shoosmith, Karen Assmann, British Antarctic Survey, Cambridge, U.K.
Stan Jacobs, Claudia Giulivi, Lahmont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Palisades, New York, U.S.A.
Hartmut Hellmer, Michael Shroeder, Alfred Wegener Institute, Bremerhaven, Germany
Stanley S. Jacobs, Adrian Jenkins, Claudia Giulivi and Pierre Dutrieux, Stronger ocean circulation and increased melting under Pine Island Glacier ice shelf, Nature Geoscience advance online publication (26 June 2011) doi:10.1038/NGEO1188
Observations beneath Pine Island Glacier in West Antarctica and implications for its retreat Adrian Jenkins, Pierre Dutrieux, Stanley S. Jacobs, Stephen D. McPhail, James R. Perrett, Andrew T. Webb, David White, Nature Geoscience 3, 468-472 (20 June 2010) doi:10.1038/ngeo890
A consistent dataset of Antarctic ice sheet topography, cavity geometry, and global bathymetry, Timmermann, R., Le Brocq, A., Deen, T., Domack, E., Dutrieux, P., Galton-Fenzi, B., Hellmer, H., Humbert, A., Jansen, D., Jenkins, A., Lambrecht, A., Makinson, K., Niederjasper, F., Nitsche, F., Nøst, O. A., Smedsrud, L. H., and Smith, W. H. F., Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 2, 261-273, 2010, doi:10.5194/essdd-3-231-2010