The glacier is located in remote East Antarctica, above the deepest land valley on Earth. The glacier contains an amount of ice equivalent to 1.5 meters of sea level rise.
Until recently, it was believed that ice loss would not occur as quickly in the eastern part of Antarctica as in the west. However, the new study has shown that warm water reaches this part of the continent as well, writes A guardian.
Australian scientists have shown how much warm water has reached the trough deep under the glacier. With the instrument floating in the water, they collected data every five days for four months from December 2020, with which they could estimate how quickly the warm water of the ice cap — the front portion of the glacier standing in the ocean — was melting.
raise the ocean level
According to Stephen Rintoul, of CSIRO and one of the study’s authors, due to the thinning of the ice sheet, the glacier has less resistance to ice flowing from Antarctica into the ocean, raising sea levels.
He said the first measurements from the ocean show that East Antarctica is contributing more to sea level rise than scientists previously thought. “One of the lessons is that when we study how much sea level rise will be in the future, we have to take into account East and West Antarctica,” the specialist summed up the experience.
Scientists have only calculated how much mass the ice sheet loses each year. The mass added to the glacier due to snowfall was not taken into account. Other recent research shows that, taking into account the mass added to the glacier due to snowfall, Denman lost about 268 billion tons of ice between 1979 and 2017 – 7 billion tons annually.
The Denman Glacier will be one of the main research objectives of the Australian Antarctic Program in the coming years. Denman Glacier is located in a very remote area of East Antarctica that was historically difficult to reach, so direct observations from this region are of great interest.
(Cover Photo: Sebnem Coskun/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)
