Mysterious Winds Cause Rapid Melting of Antarctic Ice
Scientists suspect warm föhn winds may be responsible for calving ice shelves—and when they occur is surprising.
A peculiar storm swept across the mountains of the Antarctic Peninsula in February of this year. Several scientists hunkered down in their tents as a torrent of horizontal-blowing Snow washed through.
Erin Pettit found her way through the camp by following a series of red and green canvas flags flapping on bamboo poles. But when she paused and looked up, she saw something strange: a circle of blue sky directly overhead. It revealed that no new snow was actually falling—the blizzard consisted entirely of recycled snow—a thin layer of it, only a few feet thick, blowing along the ground.
The wind had scoured this snow off the surfaces of glaciers as it accelerated down the east side of the Peninsula’s mountains. When the winds finally let up, Pettit emerged from her tent to find the snow mushy beneath her boots.
The temperature had topped 40 degrees Fahrenheit. Training her binoculars on the lower reaches of Starbuck Glacier, six miles to the east, she saw that it had taken on a bluish tint: The wind had melted enough snow to form hundreds of ponds on the glacier’s surface. It was just the sort of observation that Pettit and three other researchers had come here looking for.
After studying Antarctica’s warming climate for decades, scientists are making a surprising discovery: In some places, much of that abnormal warmth is invading in the form of powerful, downhill winds called föhn (pronounced “fone”) winds. Pettit, a glaciologist from the University of Alaska in Fairbanks and a National Geographic explorer, now suspects that these winds contributed to a series of dramatic glacial collapses that have been steadily redrawing the map on the east side of the Antarctic Peninsula for the last 30 years. Föhn winds may have escaped scientists’ notice because they don’t just blow during summer—some of their most impressive heat waves actually strike in the dead of winter, eroding glaciers at a time of year that no one thought possible.
LAND OF MELTING ICE
Antarctica sits isolated at the bottom of the world, surrounded by a vortex of circumpolar winds and ocean currents that swirl endlessly around it.
The peninsula stretches 700 miles upward into the Southern Ocean. Its mountainous spine rises 5,000 to 9,000 feet above sea level, capped with a plateau of ice—forming a wall that usually diverts the circumpolar winds northward around it. The east side of the Peninsula, shielded from these winds, is especially cold. For thousands of years, it was flanked by a series of vast ice plains—so-called “ice shelves,” 800 feet or more thick, which float on the ocean, extending up to 150 miles out over it.
The ice shelves had formed as dozens of glaciers oozed off the coastline of the peninsula, merging their ice into a vast apron that spread over the sea. But all of this began to change in 1988.
One by one, the ice shelves on the east side of the peninsula began to collapse. The first two ice shelves simply went missing—present at the beginning of a summer, then gone by the end. But the collapses of Larsen A ice shelf in 1995 and Larsen B in 2002 were violent events, documented by human witnesses and satellite photos. Larsen B, covering an area larger than the state of Rhode Island, shattered over a matter of days into thousands of shards, each larger than an aircraft carrier.
Larsen A and B showed similar symptoms leading up to their disintegration. Both ice shelves lost their insulating cover of snow, laying bare a darker, icy surface that absorbed more heat from the sun. Melt ponds grew and metastasized across their surfaces. Then this water drained into deep cracks in the ice. Its weight pushed the cracks ever deeper, like a wedge, until it broke through the bottom, says Theodore Scambos, a glaciologist at the National snow and Ice Data Center, who has studied these ice shelves for many years and camped with Pettit in Antarctica last February.
These insights seemed to explain the sudden collapse of four ice shelves in 15 years. But then in 2010, Scambos and Pettit discovered something new that would change their view of the situation.
In February of that year, they visited a small surviving piece of Larsen B—now called the Scar Inlet Ice Shelf—and installed several automatic weather stations on and around it.
Scar Inlet saw its final sunset of the year on June 13, 2010. By the height of the Antarctic winter in mid-July, temperatures there had dropped to minus 30°F. That’s when the weather stations beamed back some unexpected news via satellite phone. On July 14, winds suddenly picked up, and the temperature at Scar Inlet rose 77 degrees, peaking at 50°F. Meltwater trickled through the snow. The heat wave lasted 36 hours.
Scambos quickly recognized this as a föhn wind—a phenomenon known in other mountainous regions, from the Alps in Europe to the Rockies in Colorado. An unusual configuration of high and low pressure systems had pushed the circumpolar winds directly over the mountains of the Antarctic Peninsula rather than deflecting them to the north as usual. As the air rose up the west side of the mountains it dropped its moisture as snow—a process that counterintuitively warms the air, since water molecules release heat as they condense from vapor into ice crystals. The air then slid down the east side of the mountains—causing the air to warm further as it compressed—triggering the heat wave.
When Scambos and Pettit returned to Scar ice shelf in early 2011, they found it eerily unchanged: Boot prints from the year before remained on its surface, solidified through thawing and refreezing. Any new snow that fell during the winter had been obliterated by winds. Scambos, Pettit, and a handful of other scientists now suspect föhn winds helped set the stage for recent ice shelf collapses. These events continue to have far-reaching consequences.
