Ice shelf-ocean interaction at shallow depths needs more attention

Understanding the processes involved in basal melting of Antarctic ice shelves is important to quantify the rate at which Antarctica will lose mass. Current research of ice shelf-ocean interaction highlights deep warm water intrusions and melting along narrow grounding lines. The majority of the ice, however, lies in much shallower waters. Here we analyse the vertical structure of previously published Antarctic-wide estimates of ice shelf basal melting derived from satellites and ice shelf buttressing derived from ice sheet flow modelling. The results show that ice shelf regions with a draft shallower than 500 m account for more than 60 % of the total basal mass loss and more than 30 % of the total buttressing flux response. The oceanic processes that drive melting in shallow regions might be very different compared to the ones at depth and how well these are represented in large-scale models of Antarctic ice shelf-ocean interaction is not clear. This gap should be addressed for more accurate predictions of the Antarctic response to climate change.