Scientists have good estimates of the place the retreating grounding line is, due to satellites waiting for tiny modifications within the ice’s elevation. However they haven’t had a very good image of what the glacier’s stomach appears like on the grounding line, as a result of it’s beneath hundreds of ft of ice. “These knowledge are actually thrilling as a result of we’re getting a glance right into a hidden system,” says College of Waterloo glaciologist Christine Dow, who research Antarctic glaciers however wasn’t concerned within the analysis. 

With Icefin, the researchers may remotely pilot a digicam whereas measuring the salinity, temperature, and oxygen content material of the water. “We noticed that the ice base itself was very advanced in its topography, so there’s numerous staircases, terraces, rifts, and crevasses,” says British Antarctic Survey bodily oceanographer Peter Davis, the lead writer of one of many papers and coauthor on the opposite. “The speed of melting on totally different surfaces was very totally different.”

The place the glacier’s underside (or basal ice, within the scientific parlance) is smoother, melting is unquestionably occurring, however at a a lot slower fee than the place the topography is jagged. That’s as a result of a layer of chilly water rests the place the ice is flat, insulating it from hotter ocean water like a liquid blanket. However the place the topography is sloped and irregular, there are extra vertical surfaces the place heat water can assault the ice, together with making incursions from the facet. This melting creates a peculiar “scalloped” look, just like the floor of a golf ball. 

These advanced, increasing basal options may then affect the remainder of the ice. “If you happen to open up options beneath the ice, you additionally get comparable reflections of them on the floor, due to the best way that the ice is floating,” says Davis. “So there is a concern that should you’re widening these rifts and crevices beneath the ice, you may destabilize the ice shelf, which may result in better disintegration over time.”