Mountain Glacier Fluctuations: Changes in terminus location and mass balance

Ice Shelf Loss Sped Up Glacier Movement

Two years ago, Antarctica's Larsen B ice shelf collapsed over the course of 35 days; 3,250 square kilometers of shelf area--an area larger than that of Rhode Island--disintegrated. Two new reports have traced the effects of the collapse on the continent's remaining glaciers and found that they are flowing ever faster into the surrounding Weddell Sea.

“If anyone was waiting to find out whether Antarctica would respond quickly to climate warming, I think the answer is yes,” says the lead author of one of the reports, Ted Scambos of the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo. “We've seen 150 miles of coastline change drastically in just 15 years.” Scambos and his colleagues analyzed five images taken by the Landsat 7 satellite before and after the Larsen B breakup as well as data from ICESat, which measures changes in elevation. By tracking changes in crevasses on the glaciers' surfaces, they calculated the speed at which the ice slabs were moving. In the second report, researchers led by Eric Rignot of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory used remote sensing and radar data to calculate the glaciers' movement.