UCI researchers chart long-shrouded glacial reaches of Antarctica—Huge rivers of ice…

UCI researchers chart long-shrouded glacial reaches of Antarctica

Huge rivers of ice are found flowing seaward from continent’s deep interior

— Irvine, Calif., August 18, 2011 —

A vast network of previously unmapped glaciers on the move from thousands of miles inland to the Antarctic coast has been charted for the first time by UC Irvine scientists. The findings will be critical to tracking future sea rise from climate change.

“This is like seeing a map of all the oceans’ currents for the first time. It’s a game changer for glaciology,” said UCI Earth system science professor Eric Rignot, lead author of a paper on the ice flow published online today in Science Express. “We’re seeing amazing flows from the heart of the continent that had never been described before.”

Rignot, who is also with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and UCI associate project scientists Jeremie Mouginot and Bernd Scheuchl used billions of points of data captured by European, Japanese and Canadian satellites to weed out cloud cover, solar glare and land features. With the aid of NASA technology, they painstakingly pieced together the shape and velocity of glacial formations, including the huge bulk of previously uncharted East Antarctica, which comprises 77 percent of the continent.

Like viewing a completed jigsaw puzzle, Rignot said, the men were stunned when they stood back and took in the full picture. They discovered a new ridge splitting the 5.4 million-square-mile landmass from east to west. They found unnamed formations moving up to 800 feet each year across immense plains sloping toward the Southern Ocean – and in a different manner than past models of ice migration.

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