Abstract

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Ice shelves, the floating extension of the Antarctic ice sheet, restrain the flow of grounded ice into the ocean, and are thus an important control on Antarctica’s contribution to global sea level rise. Ice shelves interact with the ocean beneath them, and the transfer of heat through the ice-ocean boundary layer is critical in setting the basal melt rate and the sub-ice shelf circulation. As the physics of the boundary layer are poorly understood, it is inadequately represented in numerical models and this is hampering our ability to predict the future evolution of the ice shelves and understand Antarctica’s contribution to future sea-level rise. Here I will discuss new observations of the ice-ocean boundary layer beneath the southern Larsen C Ice Shelf using a unique dataset from a turbulence instrument cluster deployed through a hot-water drilled access hole in December 2011.