Serious, Salty Trouble Is Brewing Under Antarctic Glaciers
WIRED
In these conditions, and if the freshwater flow from melting ice is not too fast, seawater should be able to invade at least hundreds of feet past the grounding line, and probably miles, says Alexander Robel, head of the at ɫ and lead author of the new paper, published in the journal The Cryosphere. Yet, like tidal pumping, this phenomenon also isn’t represented in current models of glacial melt in Antarctica. “This is based on the prior assumption that basically there's a hydraulic barrier at the grounding line, and seawater never gets upstream,” says Robel.