The Ghost Plumes - 15

Fig. 1 Earth's Largest Desert

The ghost plumes originate at or above the grounding lines (Fig. 1) of Antarctica's tidewater glaciers (The Ghost Plumes, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14).

In today's post we are going to take a look at the WOD Zones in terms of the length of the grounding lines in each zone, as well as looking at those zones in terms of the in situ CTD values measured there over the years.

I fully modernized the use of those values, that is, I freed them from the constraints of EOS-80 and brought them up to TEOS-10 standards (PreTEOS-10 software).

The purpose of that modernization was, among other things, to contrast the temperature and salinity at which the tidewater glacier ice would melt upon contact with or nearness to the ambient seawater there.

That requires a look at the contrast between in situ temperature and salinity of seawater at those locations, when compared with the temperature and salinity at which the tidewater glacier ice at those locations would melt.

In the graphs, the lines on top (red, green, and brown) are the ambient seawater temperatures, while those lines under them (blue, purple, cyan) are the temperatures at which that particular tidewater glacier ice will melt.

That contrast reveals one of the most important factors about the grounding lines of Antarctic tidewater glaciers.

Which is that the ice is melting pretty much all along the ~55,000 kilometer length of the Antarctic tidewater glacier grounding lines.

This modernization and discovery has of course been accomplished by using The World Ocean Database (WOD) values processed with the TEOS-10 software (C++ TEOS-10).

Today's exercise is, then, in compliance with Professor and Research Scientist Dr. Eric Rignot, who counseled us to focus on the grounding lines (The Young Old Sea Level Change Hoax - 2).

Fig. 2 Latitude Layers

So, the links below are to appendices that focus on the grounding lines all around the perimeter of Antarctica depicted in Fig. 1 and Fig. 2 (where there are usable recorded WOD measurements).

The relevant WOD zones are located in layers 15, 16, and 17 (Fig. 2).

Today's graphs feature each individual Antarctic sector (Amundsen Sea, Bellingshausen Sea, Indian Ocean, Ross Sea, Weddell Sea, and Western Pacific Ocean); and today's HTML tables feature and detail the grounding line lengths in each WOD Zone within those Antarctic sectors.

Those grounding line HTML tables involve only the zones for which we have in situ CTD data.

Since the total length of the grounding lines is ~55,000 km, but the HTML tables length totals only ~50,239 km, this means that ~4,761 km of tidewater glacier grounding line CTD data is still obscure.

So, the remainder of those grounding lines needs to be measured and reported by Antarctic researchers before we can estimate more exactly the total number of kilometers of grounding lines in Antarctica.

However, until that happens we can easily improvise because the missing data is a small percent of the total length.

We can extrapolate by adding that small percent to our current calculated estimates.

Anyway, here are the links to today's graphs and HTML tables: Lines-only on graphs, Lines plus color fill on graphs, HTML Sector data.

The previous post in this series is here.

---

---