DEFINITION OF ROSS ICE SHELF, ANTARCTICA

Ice shelves form where ice sheets move over ocean waters and form a thick sheet of ice

floating on the water and attached to the land on one, two, or

three sides. Their seaward sides are typically marked by a

steep cliff, up to 1,500 feet (500 m) high, where many glaciers

calve off from forming icebergs. Ice shelves are found in

Antarctica, Greenland, and along the polar seacoasts of the

Canadian Arctic islands. The largest ice shelves are found in

Antarctica, which contains 91 percent of the world’s glacial

ice, around 7 percent of which is contained in ice shelves.

These ice shelves cover 50 percent of the coast of Antarctica,

forming an area 1/10th the size of the continent. The largest

ice shelf in the world is the Ross Ice Shelf (also called the

Great Ice Barrier), that fills in the southern half of the Ross

Sea, bisected by longitude 180°W (international date line).

The area covered by the Ross Ice Shelf is similar to the area of

France. The south and west sides of the ice shelf are bounded

by the Trans-Antarctic Mountains in Victoria Land, home to

the U.S. scientific research station at McMurdo Bay. The eastern

side of the Ross Ice Shelf is occupied by the ice-covered

Rockefeller Plateau of Marie Byrd Land. The Ross Ice Shelf is

fed by seven major ice streams from the surrounding mountains

and plateau, and it breaks up along its northern coast,

sending huge icebergs into warmer waters. For many centuries

there has been a balance between the amount of ice that has

fed the ice shelves of Antarctica and the ice that is lost to icebergs

in summer months. More recently, some of the ice

shelves on the Antarctic Peninsula have begun to break up,

possibly as a result of global warming. The breakup of ice

shelves does not change global sea levels because the ice is

already floating on and in isostatic equilibrium with seawater,

but these early warning signs of significant Antarctic warming

and glacial melting could be signaling a start of catastrophic

melting of the Antarctic ice sheets. Melting of continental ice

would dramatically change global sea levels and could become

one of the major environmental catastrophes facing the world

in the next few centuries.

See also GLACIER.

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