Abstract

Ice shelves, the floating extension of the Antarctic Ice Sheet, play a key role in Earth’s climate. They interact with the ocean and modify the properties of its deepest and most ubiquitous waters. They also help restrain the flow of grounded ice into the ocean, and therefore modulate the rate of change of sea level. In a changing climate, it is important to understand the processes that affect the rate at which the ocean melts ice shelves.

In this talk, I will present recent advances in observing interactions between ice shelves and the ocean using ground-based phase-sensitive radar and I will discuss a range of oceanographic processes that we are able to infer from these observations.
Examples of such processes include intermittent basal freezing episodes that act on the timescales of days to weeks, as well as seasonal and inter-annual changes in water properties flushing the ice-shelf cavities.

I will show observations from a variety of ice shelves around Antarctica, but special emphasis will be on the Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf (FRIS), where we have the most abundant datasets. Work in progress aims to utilize observational understanding of oceanic variability beneath FRIS for improving the representation of ice-ocean interactions around Antarctica in coupled simulations with the Energy Exascale Earth System Model.