Worrying phenomenon in Antarctica's ice shelves can add to climate woes

Antarctic ice shelves harbour 57 per cent of all meltwater in the form of slush during summers, research has found. Slush is water-soaked snow and, along with pooled meltwater, results in 2.8 times more meltwater formation than standard climate models have predicted, as per the study. This happens because it absorbs more heat than ice or snow.

The research team, led by the University of Cambridge, used artificial intelligence to understand how slush impacted the frozen expanse. As per the report, this "could have profound implications for ice shelf stability and sea level rise." Slush isn't taken into properly by regional climate models, the study authors say, triggering a need for change.

A warming climate leads to the formation of meltwater onice shelves. As per previous research, surface meltwater lakes can make the ice shelves unstable and even cause them to collapse because the weight of the water can bend or break the ice. When this happens, the sea level is directly impacted and can rise.

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"We can use satellite imagery to map meltwater lakes across much of Antarctica, but it's hard to map slush because it looks like other things, such as shadows from clouds when viewed from a satellite," as per lead author Dr Rebecca Dell.

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The study

Cambridge researchers worked with researchers from the University of Colorado Boulder and the Delft University of Technology to understand the impact of slush. They used historical data from NASA's Landsat 8 satellite and trained a machine-learning model to gather monthly records of slush and meltwater lakes from 57 Antarctic ice shelves between 2013 and 2021.

They made the alarming discovery that pools and lakes only made up 43 per cent of the meltwater on ice shelves, while the remaining 57 per cent was contained in slushy areas. This can speed up the melt rate considerably.

Dell added, "This slush has never been mapped on a large scale across all of Antarctica's large ice shelves, so over half of all surface meltwater has been ignored until now.

The study adds that slush has the capacity to absorb more heat since it is not as white as snow or ice, causing more snowmelt. Current climate models do not take slush into account, which has likely led to ice sheet melting and ice shelf stability projections to have been underestimated.

Amid climate change, rising sea levels pose a greater risk to coastal regions. The study was published in the journal Nature Geoscience.