On the Oceanic Circulation Near a Shelf-Ice Edge

Abstract

The ice cap covering Antarctica does in general not terminate at the edge of the continent. In most regions the ice is pushed into the sea, taking the appearance of a floating ice shelf. At the edges of the shelves, huge parts break off and drift away as tabular icebergs, characteristic for the Antarctic. As a result, the edge of an ice shelf usually has the form of a straight, vertical wall. Although the major part of this ice wall is submerged, it rises some tens of meters out of the sea — hence the common name ‘barrier’. Under typical conditions the submerged part of the ice wall measures roughly 200 m, while the sub-ice sea depths range from a few tens to a few hundreds of meters. Because the ice wall does not reach to the sea bottom, the shelf edge forms (in oceanographic sense) a highly remarkable type of ‘coast’. The present paper addresses the oceanic circulation near the shelf-ice edge, and concentrates on two aspects, namely the large-scale flow driven by wind stresses in the open sea, and the smaller-scale circulation driven by melting of the ice wall.