Delicate seafloor landforms reveal past Antarctic grounding-line retreat of kilometers per year

Abstract

A rapid retreat Are the rates at which we observe ice shelves shrinking today representative of how fast they shrank in the past? Dowdeswell et al. report observations of the Antarctic seafloor that reveal the presence of submarine grounding-zone wedges on the Larsen continental shelf (see the Perspective by Jakobsson). The authors interpret these ridges as being caused by the tidal rise and fall of the ice shelf at the grounding line, which squeezes the underlying sediments when it rests on the seafloor. From this, they calculated that ice shelf retreat at this location about 14,000 years ago was at times as much as 100 times as fast as the average over the past 10,000 years. Science , this issue p. 1020 ; see also p. 939