It was clear to anyone who went to Antarctica in the summer of 2001-02 that it was an unusually warm one — record-setting, in fact — and just one in a series of warm austral summers. That December, geologic oceanographer Eugene Domack, now at the University of South Florida, was part of an expedition sampling the Southern Ocean seafloor around the Antarctic Peninsula — then, as now, one of the fastest-warming places on the globe. Taking advantage of their proximity to the peninsula’s Larsen B ice shelf (a tongue of ice that floats on the sea and is fed by land-bound glaciers and ice streams), the group took a detour to check out the ice and sample some of the sediments from the waters around it.
The scientists knew that the ice shelf’s northern neighbor, the Larsen A, had disintegrated back in 1995, but still the sight of the Larsen B shocked them. What should have been alternating layers of compacted snow and ice, laid down each winter, was instead a huge solid layer of ice at the top of the ice shelf. Summer meltwater was forming large pools on the surface and tumbling off the edges into the ocean.
“There were waterfalls of water coming off the ice shelf,” Domack told Climate Central. “No one’s ever seen that.”
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