By C. Perera, JadeTimes News
Ice shelves around Antarctica have been melting at an accelerated rate in recent years, largely due to warm water eroding their bases from below. These warm waters are driven by currents, which are not fully understood because of the continent's vast and remote nature. Improving the mapping of these currents is crucial for understanding the future of Antarctica's ice cover.
The 2013 Marine Mammals Exploring the Oceans Pole to Pole database utilized seals equipped with temperature and salinity sensors to gather data from the remote Bellingshausen Sea in West Antarctica. Researchers, including Flexas, integrated this data with information from a 2020 autonomous undersea glider to analyze the region's hydrographic properties, such as temperature, salinity, and dissolved oxygen levels. Their findings are detailed in the Journal of Geophysical Research.
The study revealed that meltwater from the Bellingshausen Sea significantly impacts ice shelves across West Antarctica. The researchers also discovered a seafloor trough, named Seal Trough in honor of the seals that carried the instruments used for the discovery. They identified two primary sources of meltwater in the sea. one from the Venable Ice Shelf through Belgica Trough, and the other from the Abbot Ice Shelf farther west through Seal Trough. These meltwater flows feed into the Antarctic Coastal Current and may influence ice shelves in other parts of Antarctica.
Additionally, the data indicated that both the Bellingshausen Sea and the AACC extend farther west than previously known, reaching into Seal Trough and the Amundsen Sea, respectively. The authors suggest that future research should focus on the contributions of ice shelf water to the Bellingshausen Sea and emphasize the need for more synchronized data on water flows, addressing the seven year gap between their current data sets.