A pair of researchers at the University of Waterloo in Canada, working with a colleague from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in the U.S., have created a model to visualize how water flows in Antarctica’s Aurora Subglacial Basin and how it might flow in coming decades. In their paper published in the journal Nature Communications, Anna-Mireilla Hayden, Tyler Pelle and Christine Dow suggest that water flowing beneath the ice in the Antarctic today may not be reflective of how it might flow in the future.

Over the past several decades, scientists have learned much about the terrain beneath the ice that covers Antarctica by using penetrating radar. In so doing, they have discovered that there are plains, mountains and even rivers and streams down there, similar to those that exist on other ice-free continents. They have also learned that some rivers running beneath the ice make it to the ocean, dumping their contents in the sea.

In this new effort, the researchers have sought to collect all the data possible surrounding the terrain beneath the ice as well as most of what is known about the ice shelves that border the continent. Such shelves, the researchers note, have been found to slow the speed of glaciers slowly sliding into the sea.

It took the team over 11 years to collect all their data and then to use it to create a model of what they describe as Antarctica’s Aurora Subglacial Basin (ASB). Once built, they began studying it to learn more about the history of the ASB and its possible future.

The team found a lot of water moving beneath the ice, which serves as a lubricant, allowing the ice to slide to the sea. They also found that as the rivers flow to the sea, they encounter ice shelves. The speed of the water as it plows into the sea and its density result in churning which brings warmer water up from below, melting the ice shelf from below and creating what the team describes as hotspots in the ice shelves.

In looking toward the future, they found that more water will be flowing to the sea due to global warming, likely speeding up glacier flow and increasing the rate of melt in shelf hot spots. One model estimate showed water beneath Totten glacier, as just one example, carrying five times as much water by 2100.

Such effects, the model showed, could increase ice thinning by as much as 20 to 50% across much of the ice shelves. The models also showed that such an increase in water flow is likely to cause changes to the ASB as a whole, making it difficult to predict exactly how fast the ice sheets and, potentially, the ice covering the continent will melt.

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