Simultaneous disintegration of outlet glaciers in Porpoise Bay (Wilkes Land), East Antarctica, driven by sea ice break-up

Miles, Bertie W. J.; Stokes, Chris R.; Jamieson, Stewart S. R.

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-11-427-2017

Articles | Volume 11, issue 1

https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-11-427-2017

© Author(s) 2017. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-11-427-2017

© Author(s) 2017. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Articles | Volume 11, issue 1

Research article

|

08 Feb 2017

Research article |

| 08 Feb 2017

Simultaneous disintegration of outlet glaciers in Porpoise Bay (Wilkes Land), East Antarctica, driven by sea ice break-up

Bertie W. J. Miles, Chris R. Stokes, and Stewart S. R. Jamieson

Data sets

Bootstrap Sea Ice Concentrations from Nimbus-7 SMMR and DMSP SSM/I-SSMIS, Version 2. J. C. Comiso https://doi.org/10.5067/J6JQLS9EJ5HU

Short summary

We observe a large simultaneous calving event in Porpoise Bay, East Antarctica, where ~ 2900 km² of ice was removed from floating glacier tongues between January and April 2007. This event was caused by the break-up of the multi-year sea ice usually occupies the bay, which we link to climatic forcing. We also observe a similar large calving event in March 2016 (~ 2200 km²), which we link to the long-term calving cycle of Holmes (West) Glacier.