Scientists complete first ever Antarctic ice flow map

[News_Editor]

Scientists complete first ever Antarctic ice flow map

2011-08-19 07:07:20 GMT+7 (ICT)

WASHINGTON, D.C. (BNO NEWS) -- The first complete map of the speed and direction of ice flow in Antarctica has been completed by a NASA-funded research, the administration said on Thursday.

As a key element to help scientists track future sea-level increases due to global climate change, the map shows glaciers flowing thousands of miles (kilometers) from the continent's deep interior to its coast. The team of researchers was able to create the map using integrated radar observations from a consortium of international satellites.

Researchers used billions of data points captured by European, Japanese and Canadian satellites to weed out cloud cover, solar glare and land features masking the glaciers. The team was also able to piece together the shape and velocity of glacial formations, including the previously uncharted East Antarctica, which comprises 77 percent of the continent.

"This is like seeing a map of all the oceans' currents for the first time," said Eric Rignot of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, the lead author of a paper about the ice flow. "It's a game changer for glaciology. We are seeing amazing flows from the heart of the continent that had never been described before."

As the scientists stood back and took in the full, completed picture, they discovered a new ridge splitting the 5.4 million-square-mile (13.9 million square kilometer) landmass from east to west. In addition, the team found unnamed formations moving up to 800 feet (243 meters) annually across immense plains sloping toward the Antarctic Ocean and in a different manner than past models of ice migration.

"The map points out something fundamentally new: that ice moves by slipping along the ground it rests on," said Thomas Wagner, NASA's cryospheric program scientist in Washington. "That's critical knowledge for predicting future sea level rise. It means that if we lose ice at the coasts from the warming ocean, we open the tap to massive amounts of ice in the interior."

NASA worked along with several other space agencies, including those of Europe, Japan, and Canada. In addition to Rignot, other researchers included University of California, Irvine scientists Jeremie Mouginot and Bernd Scheuchl.

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