Antarctica's Glaciers by Ocean Area and WOD Zone - 2

Fig. 1 WOD Zones and Areas A-F

I. Background

This series takes a look at the abundance of glaciers in Antarctica, focusing primarily on the tidewater glaciers there @ the largest desert.

In the first post I listed all of them by six Southern Ocean areas, and by the WOD Zones in each of those six areas.

Those six areas were first listed in a paper I cited in an earlier post and series (Recent high-resolution Antarctic ice velocity maps reveal increased mass loss in Wilkes Land, East Antarctica).

Fig. 2 CT & CT melt temperatures

One thing I want to stress in this series is the number of glaciers in Antarctica that are melting and calving.

Two WOD Zones (3716 @ Ross Sea, and 5606 @ Bellingshausen Sea) have an enormous number of glaciers that are melting.

Today I want to focus on the Ross Sea area, @ WOD Zone 3716.

It has 106 tidewater glaciers as follows:

Adams (Victoria Land), Aeronaut, Aiken, Alberich, Albrecht Penck, Allison (Antarctica), Alvarez, Amos, Amphitheatre, Anderton, Ant Hill, Anu Whakatoro, Argonaut, Arruiz, Astakhov, Astapenko, Astronaut, Atka, Atkinson, Aurora (Antarctica), Aviator, Backstairs Passage, Baker, Ball (Victoria Land), Barber, Barne, Barnett, Baronick, Bartley, Bates, Baxter, Beaman, Blankenship, Borchgrevink, Canada, Clarke (Victoria Land), Co-pilot, Commonwealth, Coulston, Crescent (Antarctica), Crume, Dale, David, Debenham, Decker, Deming, Dennistoun, Ebbe, Emmanuel, Endeavour Piedmont, Erebus, Falkner, Ferrar, Finley, Fitch, Gair, Garwood, Greenwell, Haffner, Helfferich, Icebreaker, Ironside, Irving (Antarctica), Irwin, Kirkby, Koettlitz, Lillie, Lovejoy, Marchant, Marchetti, Marin, Mariner, Meander, Nash, Newall, Northwind, Oakley, O Hara, Pilot, Priddy, Priestley, Pryor, Puanu, Rennick, Robson (Antarctica), Shark Fin, Sharpend, Sheehan, Shell, Shipley, Shoemaker, Simpson, Skelton, Suess, Suter, Taylor, Telemeter, Tucker, Vacchi Piedmont, Vereyken, Wirdnam, Wright Lower, Zenith, Zetland, Zoller, Zykov

(links to each are here). The small (by comparison to all of Antarctica) area where these 106 glaciers calve and melt into the Southern Ocean is shown in Fig. 1 (in the lower left corner of area "C" at the bottom of the graphic).

II. Why The Glaciers Calve & Melt

WOD Zone 3716 ocean temperatures (at 0-700 m and >700 m) are shown in Fig. 2 along with the cold temperatures of the water when the even colder ice first melts after contact with that ocean water.

These graphs are made using TEOS-10 formulas, which are the official formulas for oceanography today (TEOS-10 toolkit; McDougall, T.J. and P.M. Barker, 2011: Getting started with TEOS-10 and the Gibbs Seawater (GSW) Oceanographic Toolbox, 28pp., SCOR/IAPSO WG127, ISBN 978-0-646-55621-5).

III. Conclusion

It is way beyond the time that we should have grasped the magnitude of the predicament that civilization is facing (Civilization Is Now On Suicide Watch, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8).

The next post in this series is here, the previous post in this series is here.