ARC Australian Centre for Excellence in Antarctic Science<\/a> (ACEAS) and UNSW Sydney.<\/p>\n\u201cIce shelves act like dam walls, holding back the land ice behind them. When they melt from below and collapse, land ice flows into the ocean more readily, raising global sea levels and affecting coastal communities worldwide.\u201d<\/p>\n
He says global sea-level rise projections remain uncertain partly because climate models do not account for how the ocean interacts with ice shelves and the processes that drive basal melting.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur study highlights missing dynamics that could enhance Antarctic ice loss in future scenarios.\u201d<\/p>\n
Two modes of melting<\/p>\n
Basal melting often occurs at small spatial and temporal scales, making it difficult to model or observe.<\/p>\n
To investigate this process, the team ran a high-resolution ocean model \u2013 the Whole Antarctic Ocean Model (WAOM) \u2013 which allowed them to simulate how ocean water moved under the ice shelves and entered their cavities.<\/p>\n
The results highlighted two distinct modes of melting across Antarctica.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur findings suggest that East Antarctica\u2019s ice shelves, like Totten, experience strong shallow melting during summer, as warm surface waters intrude beneath them,\u201d says Dr Boeira Dias.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis process shuts down during winter, as areas of open water called coastal polynyas form near the coastline and cool the ocean surface,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn contrast, ice shelves in West Antarctica like Getz or Thwaites melt more steadily throughout the year due to the persistent inflow of warm Circumpolar Deep Water.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"New research into how East Antarctica\u2019s ice shelves melt reveals future global sea-level rise predictions could be significantly…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":250855,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[64,63,69596,1325,129868,337,129866,128,88733,69597,148823,148822,101615,2261],"class_list":{"0":"post-250854","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-science","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-division-of-equity-diversity-inclusion","11":"tag-general","12":"tag-networks-and-partnerships","13":"tag-research","14":"tag-resilient-society","15":"tag-science","16":"tag-science-tech","17":"tag-sdg","18":"tag-sdg13","19":"tag-sdg14","20":"tag-sdg15","21":"tag-sustainability"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/250854","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=250854"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/250854\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/250855"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=250854"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=250854"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=250854"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}