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- C33E-1006: Piecing together the evolution of ice shelf rift mélange with multi-sensor satellite observations
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Board 1006‚ Hall EFG (Poster Hall)NOLA CC
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Chancelor Roberts, University of California San Diego (First Author)
Helen Amanda Fricker, University of California San Diego (Presenting Author)
Laurence Padman, Earth & Space Research
Catherine Walker, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
Antarctica holds enough ice to raise sea levels by tens of meters, and its floating ice shelves help slow the loss of this land-based ice. When ice shelves weaken through thinning by warm water contact at the base, glacier flow can accelerate, increasing the rate of sea level rise. Full-thickness ice shelf rifts may be more vulnerable to these effects, since they are often partially filled with a soft mixture of ice shelf debris, snow and a buildup of frozen sea water. This mixture, termed “mélange”, may sometimes hold fractures closed and other times force them open. We hypothesize that mélange affects rift growth differently depending on how thickly it is able to accumulate and how cohesive it becomes. Studying how mélange evolves alongside rifts is difficult because no single satellite can capture the necessary detail over time. In this project, we combine two complementary datasets to produce detailed elevation maps of mélange-filled ice shelf rifts. With these data, we show that mélange thickness and surface features vary across the Antarctic Ice Sheet. The results improve our understanding of how fractures grow and how much support ice shelves provide to the glaciers behind them.
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