Heat and meltwater fluxes across the front of Dotson ice shelf cavity, Amundsen Sea

Ice shelves terminating in the Amundsen Sea are losing mass rapidly, exporting an increasing amount of meltwater into the ocean. Investigation into the melt rates of ice shelves near in the Amundsen Sea is therefore crucial for predicting the impact of ice shelf processes on future climate. However, observations near ice shelves often lack continuity in either time or space, limiting our knowledge of their melt rates. During a research cruise in austral summer 2022, we undertook a high resolution (horizontal sampling interval: ~ 2 km) CTD/LADCP transect spanning the front of the Dotson ice shelf encompassing the inflow and outflow to the ice shelf cavity.  In addition, we deployed three ocean gliders yielding five fine-resolution (horizontal sampling interval: ~ 650 m) hydrographic transects along the front of the Dotson Ice Shelf over three weeks. With an average of just 4.5 days between occupations, these new observations allow us to comprehensively investigate short-term variability along the ice front. The glider transects revealed considerable temporal variability in the across-ice shelf current speed.

The CTD section reveals that the meltwater content is higher (around 20 g/kg) in the west (outflow) and lower (around 10 g/kg) in the east (inflow), with a meltwater-poor layer centred at about 350 m sandwiched between two meltwater-rich layers along the ice shelf transect (one above about 250 m and the second centred at about 450 m). We reference geostrophic shear to the LADCP velocity profiles and demonstrate that the net volume flux across the ice shelf front is close to zero. We then calculate the net ocean heat flux across the ice shelf front to be  2.9×10¹¹ W. Assuming that this net heat loss all results from basal melting, we estimate the glacial melt rate from this heat flux to be 28.1 Gt yr^-1. The net transport of meltwater out of the cavity is 9.8×10⁵ kg s^-1, which is equivalent to 31 Gt yr^-1, remarkably similar to the heat-flux-derived value. The small difference between the meltwater-flux-derived and heat-flux-derived melt rates might be attributed to subglacial rivers or other uncertainties in the estimates. Finally, we discuss the heat and meltwater fluxes using the glider transects and determine their temporal variability.