2023 Marked By Record Warmth And Melting At The North End Of The Antarctic Peninsula

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Iceberg A23a calved from the Filchner-Ronne ice shelf in West Antarctica in 1986. The massive berg started to drift away from the Weddell Seas after warm surface water melted the glacier underbelly enough that it lifted off the ocean ridge it was stuck on for 37 years. Satellite imagery caught the iceberg moving out of the Wedell Sea and past the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula.

As of 12-15-2023, the 2023 melt season has impacted East Antarctica’s Amery Ice Shelf, and the Dronning Maud Land Ice Shelf has above-average melting. But the Antarctic Peninsula has had exceptional melt this summer, a/k/a The Midnight Sun that runs from October to February. The 2022-2023 melt season made news after Nature published a study titled Record-high Antarctic Peninsula temperatures and surface melt in February 2022: a compound event with an intense atmospheric river.

Research teams are only beginning to accumulate data as most scientists have only recently arrived in various regions of the world’s largest ice cap. As a result, research is still underway for the 2023-2024 melt season.

Startling news for the 2022-2023 melt season and the Antarctic Peninsula, where the Antarctic Peninsula had experienced a “new extreme warm event and record-high surface melt in February 2022, rivaling the recent temperature records from 2015 and 2020, and contributing to the alarming series of extreme warm events over this region showing stronger warming compared to the rest of Antarctica.” The northern and northwestern AP was impacted by an Atmospheric River that had attained a Category Three on the Atmospheric River Scale (AR). According to the study abstract, the river brought anomalous heat and rainfall to the peninsula’s tip. “The event was triggered by multiple large-scale atmospheric circulation patterns linking the AR formation to tropical convection anomalies and stationary Rossby waves, with an anomalous Amundsen Sea Low and a record-breaking high-pressure system east of the AP.” Circulation analysis linked climate change directly to the storms' powerful amplification impacts while increasing the probability of the storm even occurring.

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The melting of the AP in 2022-2023 has resulted in a mind-boggling increase in speed and significant ice loss at three glaciers. The Hectoria Glacier quadrupled its sliding speed and lost 15 miles of ice at its front over 16 months, according to a must-read article by Douglas Fox in Science Direct. He found that the sea ice loss enabled massive heavy waves of ocean water to smash into areas protected by sea ice. The same phenomenon occurred at Thwaites Glacier in December 2022 after Iceberg B22a moved from a sea mount, exposing the calving front to wave action. I am not aware of any major calving event anywhere in Antarctica. There were, however, multiple minor calving events at Getz Ice Shelf.

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https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/12/27/2214014/-The-tip-of-the-Antarctica-Peninsula-is-melting-out?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=trending&pm_medium=web