Climate change is already taking its toll as a set of record ocean studies was published on Friday regarding the observations made scientists at the US and Australian institutions. The subject is the largest glacier in the world, the Totten Glacier in East Antarctica.
The ocean observations according to the scientists are very bothersome because what they already feared is now happening. The Totten glacier is melting from below!
It is indeed that the warm ocean water is pouring out towards the glacier at the rate of 220,000 cubic meters per second. These waters cause the ice shelf to drop from 63 to 80 billion tons of its chunk to the ocean annually and almost 10 meters of its thickness which is a decrease that was before distinguished based on satellite measurement, as reported by The Sydney Morning Herald.
"This ice shelf is thinning, and it's thinning because the ocean is delivering warm water to the ice shelf, just like in West Antarctica," said Don Blankenship, a glaciologist at the University of Texas at Austin and one of the study's co-authors.
He may not be in aboard the research vessel; however, he and his colleagues assisted the Australia-based researchers with the interpretation of the sea floor contours in order to organize their field investigations from where warm and deep waters could enter.
Dr. Stephen Rintoul and his colleagues were on board the state vessel Aurora Australis which enabled them to traverse remarkably close to the Totten ice shelf edge. It was in January 2015, his team was able to collect the needed ocean observations and to determine the warm water. He was the Science Advances lead author that was published on Friday.
As reported by ABC News, the research was published while a team of scientists went back to the Totten glacier. They hope to find more proofs regarding on what regulates the amount of warm water that reaches the glacier. Dr. Rintoul stated that their objective was to learn more about the outlets that carry the warm water up from the deep ocean.
It looks like that West Antarctica and East Antarctica feature numerous regions including Totten where enormous amounts of ice surge above the ocean level, but are confined deep below it. In the case of Totten glacier, its so-called "grounding line" is where the glacier starts to lift off the sea floor and to float.
