
The front of the Ross Ice Shelf floats in the Ross Sea, Antarctica. Matt Siegfried/Scripps Institution of Oceanography, CC BY-NC
Madelaine Gamble Rosevear, University of Tasmania; Ben Galton-Fenzi; Bishakhdatta Gayen, The University of Melbourne, and Catherine Vreugdenhil, The University of MelbourneThe size of the Antarctic ice sheet can be hard to comprehend. Two kilometres thick on average and covering nearly twice the area of Australia, the ice sheet holds enough freshwater to raise global sea levels by 58 metres.
Ice loss from this sheet is projected to be the leading driver of sea level rise by 2100, yet its contribution remains highly uncertain. While sea levels are certain to rise this century, projections of the contribution from Antarctic ice vary from a 44 cm rise to a 22 cm fall.
Much of this uncertainty is because the ocean processes that control the fate of the sheet occur on an incredibly small scale and are very difficult to measure and model.
But recently scientists have made significant progress in understanding this “ice-ocean boundary layer”. This progress is the subject of our new review paper, published today in Annual Reviews.
Shrinking, thinning and retreating
At the margins of the Antarctic ice sheet, glaciers flow into the Southern Ocean, forming floating ice shelves. These ice shelves act as...