To answer that question, the JPL and UC Irvine researchers focused on mélange. The snag slows the glacier’s forward movement in the same way a highway accident slows down the traffic behind it – except that an ice-shelf snag can hold back the flow of ice into the sea for thousands of years. As a glacier’s ice shelf flows out over the Southern Ocean, it eventually snags on an island, undersea ridge, or the wall of the bay that encloses the glacier. Ice shelves, the floating tongues of glaciers that extend over the ocean, slow the rate at which Antarctica’s glaciers contribute to global sea level rise. The finding that mélange – a mixture of windblown snow, iceberg bits, and sea ice lodged in and around ice shelves – is critical in holding ice shelves together implies that the these ice shelves may break up even faster than scientists had expected due to rising air temperatures. Researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California and the University of California, Irvine, have discovered an ice process that may have caused a Delaware-size iceberg to break off Antarctica’s immense Larsen C ice shelf in the Southern Hemisphere winter of 2017.
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