Melt events on both sides of the Antarctic Peninsula and along the Dronning Maud coastal ice shelves between December 15 and 19 combined to produce an early-season record melt extent of just below 2 percent of the Antarctic Ice Sheet for December 18. A high-pressure ridge over the Peninsula that followed a strong westerly wind, or foehn wind, event seemed to be the cause of the Peninsula melting while strong low-pressure centers just north of the Dronning Maud coast pushed warm air onto the Riiser-Larsen, Fimbul, and Lazarev ice shelves in East Antarctica during the same period according to a weather assessment from ClimateReanalyzer.com.
A video of the impact of the melting from the easternmost area of strong melt near the Sør Rondane Mountains was posted online by a Belgian field team. A Landsat 8 scene of the area shows extensive blue ice, indicating much of the past winter’s snow cover has ablated away in warm winds preceding the melt event.
Earlier intense spikes in melt extent appeared along the Peninsula and elsewhere on the continent’s margins during the austral spring.
The extensive melting was forecast to be even more widespread in the following week from December 22 to 28. A summary of the melt season to date will be posted in early January.
