4 E. Antarctic Glaciers Next to Vast Totten Glacier Losing Mass Far Faster Than Projected
East Antarctica was supposed to be the stable side of the icy continent, whose western flank is losing ice fast1. But glaciologists are finding that the closer they look at East Antarctica, the more change they see.
Four small glaciers in a region known as Vincennes Bay are thinning at surprisingly fast rates, researchers reported on 10 December at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in Washington DC. People think that East Antarctica is stable, says Helen Fricker, a glaciologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California. But its where we should be looking.
The glaciers are responding to warm ocean waters that now reach much closer to East Antarcticas icy edge than in years past and might continue to do so. Its a signal of whats to come, says Catherine Walker, a glaciologist at NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, who led the team analysing the glaciers.
The Vincennes Bay glaciers lie next to East Antarcticas awakening giant, a massive river of ice known as Totten. Tottens flow to the sea sped up between 2001 and 2007, most likely because warm water was intruding beneath the floating end of the glacier and melting it from below2. Now, the giants neighbours might also be rousing themselves, Walker says. Vincennes Bay caught her eye as she was looking at a map of how quickly ice flows in different parts of Antarctica. The four glaciers Vanderford, Adams, Bond and Underwood seemed to be accelerating their course to the sea.
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https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07714-1