Climate change: 'Stunning' seafloor ridges record Antarctic retreat

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-52845990

Climate change: 'Stunning' seafloor ridges record Antarctic retreat

By Jonathan Amos
BBC Science Correspondent

1 hour ago

Scientists are learning just how fast the ice margin of Antarctica can retreat in a warming world.

They've identified features on the seafloor that indicate the ice edge was reversing at rates of up to 50m a day at the end of the last ice age. That's roughly 10 times faster than what's observed by satellites today.

The discovery is important because it puts realistic constraints on the computer simulations that are used to project future change in the region.
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The director of the Scott Polar Research Institute (SPRI) in Cambridge, UK, led an expedition last year to the Larsen region of the Antarctic Peninsula.

His team deployed autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) with high-resolution mapping capability to examine the sediments at the bottom of the western Weddell Sea.

What the robots saw was a delicate pattern of ridges that looked like a series of ladders where each rung was about 1.5m high and spaced roughly 20-25m apart. The scientists interpret these features to be "grounding-zone wedges".

The grounding zone is the point where the ice flowing off Antarctica into the ocean becomes buoyant and starts to float. The wedges are created as the ice at this location repeatedly pats the sediments as the tides rise and fall.

For the pattern to have been produced and preserved, the ice must have been in retreat (advancing ice would destroy the wedges). And the tidal "clock" therefore gives a rate for this reversal.

Prof Dowdeswell explained: "We have a maximum of 90 of these wedges with a spacing of 20-25m - that gives us, if extrapolated, a rate of 40-50m per day. Again, if extrapolated - that's a rate in excess of 10km per year of retreat. And the really interesting thing about that is it's a rate that's pretty much an order of magnitude higher than even the most rapid retreat of the grounding lines in the Pine Island-Thwaites system today."
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