Natural History Wanderings

Earth Observatory reports

For many ice shelves around Antarctica, the 1970s was a bumpy decade. Fast forward, and satellite images show that many of the bumps once prominently visible on the surface of ice shelves have smoothed—implying that the shelves have become thinner and less stable.

An ice shelf is the extension of land-based ice—a tongue of a glacier that has stretched out from the coast and onto the surface of the ocean. Most of the planet’s ice shelves fringe Antarctica, where they play an important role in holding back, or buttressing, the flow of ice from inland and upstream. Such buttressing can slow the discharge of ice into the ocean and limit sea level rise. Thick, stable ice shelves perform this buttressing role most effectively.

Read more Antarctica Unpinned