What's Cooking in Antarctica? A modeling study of Cook Ice Shelf, East Antarctica

The East Antarctic Ice Sheet contains within it water equivalent to a global sea level rise of 53m, an order of magnitude greater than the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet. Whilst East Antarctica is thought to be comparatively stable when compared to West Antarctica, some recent studies suggest that parts of East Antarctica are thinning and may be vulnerable to ocean induced retreat. One such place is Cook Ice shelf, which following a previous calving event failed to regrow much of the ice shelf. We use Úa, a finite element ice-flow model, to investigate the effect various calving events have upon ice flux over the grounding line.