Sunday, March 03, 2019

My sincerest sympathies for the fatalities and injuries in Alabama tonight. I am going to return to a couple of articles about Antarctica.

Kindly note the map to the left of Antarctica. The Peninsula is at 10 o'clock. The Ross Sea is at 7 o'clock and the area discussed in this article from NASA is a section of East Antarctica at 4 o'clock. Each study listed here are separate and different with autonomous authors, yet each one is picking up vastly changing conditions in Antarctica's ice.

December 10, 2018

A group of four glaciers in an area of East Antarctica called Vincennes Bay, west of the massive Totten Glacier, have lowered their surface height by about 9 feet since 2008, hinting at widespread changes in the ocean. The data used for this map is an early version of the NASA MEaSUREs ITS_LIVE project and was produced by Alex Gardner, NASA-JPL.

East Antarctica (click here) has the potential to reshape coastlines around the world through sea level rise, but scientists have long considered it more stable than its neighbor, West Antarctica. Now, new detailed NASA maps of ice velocity and elevation show that a group of glaciers spanning one-eighth of East Antarctica’s coast have begun to lose ice over the past decade, hinting at widespread changes in the ocean.

In recent years, researchers have warned that Totten Glacier, a behemoth that contains enough ice to raise sea levels by at least 11 feet, appears to be retreating because of warming ocean waters. Now, researchers have found that a group of four glaciers sitting to the west of Totten, plus a handful of smaller glaciers farther east, are also losing ice.
"Totten is the biggest glacier in East Antarctica, so it attracts most of the research focus," said Catherine Walker, a glaciologist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, who presented her findings at a press conference on Monday at the American Geophysical Union meeting in Washington. "But once you start asking what else is happening in this region, it turns out that other nearby glaciers are responding in a similar way to Totten."
For her research, Walker used new maps of ice velocity and surface height elevation that are being created as part of a new NASA project called Inter-mission Time Series of Land Ice Velocity and Elevation....