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Receding. The West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) is the segment of the continental ice sheet that covers West Antarctica, the portion of Antarctica on the side of the Transantarctic Mountains that lies in the Western Hemisphere. It is classified as a marine-based ice sheet, meaning that its bed lies well below sea level and its edges flow into ...
The Antarctic ice sheet is a continental glacier covering 98% of the Antarctic continent, with an area of 14 million square kilometres (5.4 million square miles) and an average thickness of over 2 kilometres (1.2 mi). It is the largest of Earth's two current ice sheets, containing 26.5 million cubic kilometres (6,400,000 cubic miles) of ice ...
West Antarctica, or Lesser Antarctica, one of the two major regions of Antarctica, is the part of that continent that lies within the Western Hemisphere, and includes the Antarctic Peninsula. It is separated from East Antarcticaby the Transantarctic Mountainsand is covered by the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. It lies between the Ross Sea(partly ...
The Ross Ice Shelf is one of many such shelves. It reaches into Antarctica from the north, and covers an area of about 520,000 km 2 (200,000 sq mi), nearly the size of France. [2][3] The ice mass is about 800 km (500 mi) wide and 970 km (600 mi) long. In some places, namely its southern areas, the ice shelf can be almost 750 m (2,450 ft) thick.
The Thwaites Glacier Tongue, or Western Glacier Tongue (75°0′S106°50′W / 75.000°S 106.833°W) was a narrow, floating part of the glacier, located about 30 mi (48 km) east of Mount Murphy. [ 28 ] It was the first part of the glacier to be mapped, [ 1 ] based on 65,000 aerial photographs collected during Operation Highjump in 1947.
The ice sheet that drains into the Amundsen Sea averages about 3 km (1.9 mi) in thickness. It is roughly the size of the state of Texas and is known as the Amundsen Sea Embayment (ASE); it forms one of the three major ice drainage basins of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet along with the Ross Sea Embayment and the Weddell Sea Embayment.
Greenland ice sheet as seen from space. An ice sheet is a body of ice which covers a land area of continental size - meaning that it exceeds 50,000 km 2. [4] The currently existing two ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica have a much greater area than this minimum definition, measuring at 1.7 million km 2 and 14 million km 2, respectively.
West Antarctic Rift System (between red dash lines). Dots are geologic drill holes. Insert map shows approximate extent. Exploration of the geology of the West Antarctic Rift System is limited because apart from peaks of the Transantarctic Mountains that protrude above the ice, much of the region is covered by the Ross Ice Shelf and the vast West Antarctic Ice Sheet.