Abstract. Antarctic ice shelves provide buttressing support to the ice sheet, stabilising the flow of grounded ice and its contribution to global sea levels. Over the past 50 years, satellite observations have shown ice shelves collapse, thin, and retreat; however, there are few measurements of the Antarctic-wide change in ice shelf area. Here, we use MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) satellite data to measure the change in ice shelf calving front position and area on 34 ice shelves in Antarctica from 2009 to 2019. Over the last decade, a reduction in the area on the Antarctic Peninsula (6693 km2) and West Antarctica (5563 km2) has been outweighed by area growth in East Antarctica (3532 km2) and the large Ross and Ronne–Filchner ice shelves (14 028 km2). The largest retreat was observed on the Larsen C Ice Shelf, where 5917 km2 of ice was lost during an individual calving event in 2017, and the largest area increase was observed on Ronne Ice Shelf in
Our observations show that Antarctic ice shelves gained 661 Gt of ice mass over the past decade, whereas the steady-state approach would estimate substantial ice loss over the same period, demonstrating the importance of using time-variable calving flux observations to measure change.
American Geophysical Union
Rain falls at the Dumont d’Urville Station in the eastern Antarctic coast, New Year’s Day 2014.
Credit: Bruno Jourdain /Nicolas Jourdain / UGA/CNRS/IPEV
Liza Lester, +1 (202) 777-7494, [email protected] (UTC -4 hours)
Étienne Vignon, Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique, CNRS, Sorbonne Université, [email protected] (UTC +2 hours)
Alexis Berne, Environmental Remote Sensing Laboratory, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, [email protected] (UTC +2 hours)
Rainfall could increase in amount, frequency and intensity over the next 80 years along the coast of Antarctica, a new study predicts.
By 2100, if greenhouse gases continue to be released at a high level, rain might increase by 240% on average across the continent.