'Incredible data': Manitoba researcher part of Antarctic ice shelf studies
CTV
A University of Manitoba scientist got a view of Antarctica not everyone has seen in an effort to study how rising sea levels are impacting the continent's ice shelves.
A University of Manitoba scientist got a view of Antarctica not everyone has seen in an effort to study how rising sea levels are impacting the continent's ice shelves.
Glaciologist Karen Alley, an assistant professor at the University of Manitoba, is part of an international research team examining a massive ice shelf in west Antarctica, capturing new 3D images to examine the changes.
"We're interested in understanding how the Antarctic ice sheet is changing," Alley said. "The world sea levels are rising, they will continue to rise in the future, and we're trying to understand how quickly that sea-level rise is going to happen and how much sea-level rise we're going to get, and a big part of that is understanding these floating ice shelves."
The team, led by Anna Wåhlin from the University of Gothenburg, sent an automated underwater vehicle named Ran underneath the ice shelf to capture images in 2022. A multi-beam imager was used to bounce sound waves off the ice and create 3D images.
The work was recently published in Science Advances.
"Ran worked for many years and brought back incredible data that's really changed the way we understand a lot of the polar systems," Alley said.
