I'm Ryan Walker. I work here at the Cryospheric Sciences Lab.
I work on computer simulations of the
Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets.
to project how much of the ice is going from
land into the ocean because it's possibly
an important contributor to sea level rise under climate change.
My name is Christine Dyer.
I'm researching sub-antarctic lake developments,
so using numerical models to see how water
builds up and depletes underneath the Antarctic ice sheets.
So we went to the new South Korean research station
Jang Bogo at Terra Nova Bay not too far from
the United States McMurdo base.
The Korea Polar Research Institute
fed and housed us for five weeks and
provided helicopters and worked with us.
It was something that we absolutely could not have
done without them.
In this first study, we were looking at how the ocean
tides affect the motion both horizontally and vertically
of the Nansen Ice Shelf.
Examining how the ice shelf responds to tides
helps us get at the dynamics of how the ice flows and
we're hoping will help future computer simulations.
In order to get over to the Nansen Ice Shelf
you fly over extremely dramatic cliffs,
very large areas of ice cravassing.
So it's quite spectacular on the way over.
There was one particular moment, actually,
when we first arrived to our tilt meter site.
There was no wind at all and
there was quite a lot of snow around.
And the most poignant thing I think was the silence.
When the helicopter shut down, nobody was talking.
You could not hear a single thing and that's such
an usual thing to be able to find in the world.
No plane noises, no electricity noises, just absolutely nothing.
And it was one of the most spectacular places I've ever been.
The Antarctic ice sheet is flowing under its own weight
spreading out from the center of the continent out
to the edges and when it reaches the ocean
it goes afloat as ice shelves.
And where you have ice shelves
that are in bays where the ice contact with the rock walls
this friction acts to hold back the ice flow,
so in some sense
these smaller ice shelves are like corks.
So as soon as you remove them, there's nothing preventing
the ice mass from moving quick down.
If these calve off, if these break off
right back to where the ice is resting on land
it can speed up dramatically and it's particular worry
at the moment that the ice shelves around the Antarctic
are going to break up and then we're going to see
an unprecedented speed up in the ice coming out
of the center of the ice sheet.