Jakarta –
lapisano is Denman gave Antarctica the east is melting at a rate of 70.8 billion tons per year, according to researchers from the Australian National Science Agency. The reason is the ingress of warmer sea water.
Researchers from the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), led by senior scientist Esmee van Wijk, said their observations suggest that the Denman Glacier is potentially at risk of unstable retreat.
Quoted by The Guardian, Tuesday (10/18/2022) This glacier is located in remote East Antarctica, above the deepest terrestrial canyon on Earth. The Denman Ice Sheet contains a volume of ice equivalent to a sea level rise of 1.5m.
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Until now, East Antarctica was not expected to suffer the rapid ice loss that the west did. But some recent research suggests that hot water also reaches parts of the continent.
Australian scientists are using profile buoy measurements to show how much warm water is reaching the deep trenches that run beneath the glacier. They had intended to study another glacier, Totten, but when the buoy moved away, it got closer to Denman.
The researchers collected observations every five days for four months starting in December 2020. From that data, they estimated the rate at which warm water was causing the melting of the ice caps, the fronts of glaciers that float in the oceans.
The melting of the floating parts of the glacier does not add to the rise in sea level. But Stephen Rintoul, a CSIRO colleague and co-author of the article, says that as the ice sheet becomes thinner or weaker, it provides less resistance to the flow of ice from Antarctica to the ocean.
“The ice that flows from Antarctica to the sea is what raises the sea level,” he said.
Rintoul said the recoil slope under Denman made him potentially unstable and in danger of a permanent retreat. He said the data, the first to use measurements taken from the ocean, have contributed to the growth of scientific work showing East Antarctica may be contributing more to sea level rise than we thought.
“One of the take-home messages is that when we look at how much sea level will rise in the future, we need to consider East Antarctica, as well as West Antarctica,” he explained.
For the record, scientists only calculate the amount of mass of the ice sheet that is lost each year. This does not include the mass added to the glacier by snowfall.
Another recent study found that with the snowfall factor, Denman still lost about 268 billion tons of ice, about 7 billion tons per year, between 1979 and 2017.
Rintoul said the researchers hope to collect more data using Australia’s new icebreaker, the RSV Nuyina, on a trip scheduled for early 2025.
Sue Cook, an ice sheet glaciologist at the University of Tasmania, said East Antarctica was not expected to experience rapid ice loss until now because the water in the region is mostly cold.
“But we recently realized that relatively warm water can reach the East Antarctic ice sheet in some locations, and this document confirms that one of those locations is Denman Glacier,” Cook said.
He said Denman Glacier would be a research center for the Australian Antarctic program for years to come, which would increase scientific knowledge of the region.
“Denman Glacier is in a very remote region of East Antarctica that has historically been difficult to access, so it was great to see direct observations from this region,” Cook said.
“They can tell us a lot about the situation lapisano is at the moment and how it could change “.
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(rns / fay)
