Word: shelffuls
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...helicopter heads out over McMurdo Sound, crossing a monotonous expanse of sea ice broken only by a smattering of icebergs and occasional clusters of Weddell seals. At last, off to one side, you see it: the Ross Ice Shelf, a mesmerizing expanse of white that stretches to the horizon and beyond. Wreathed in ice fog, the ice shelf takes on the haziness of a mirage. Yet it is all too substantial. Its surface ripples with undulating pressure ridges and solid, wind-hewn waves called sastrugi that move with the ice as it flows inexorably toward...
Like everything else in Antarctica, the Ross Ice Shelf is outsize, a chunk of frozen water bigger than Texas jutting off a continent that is half again as large as the U.S. It is deeply mysterious, for its ice, like the ice that covers the rest of Antarctica, conceals far more than it reveals. Three years ago, the Ross Ice Shelf started calving icebergs so big that they invited comparison with Massachusetts and Connecticut, and some of these bergs--including C-19, which broke off the shelf last May--lurk nearby, provoking consternation and wonder...
What does this sudden flood of icebergs mean? Was the ice shelf, as most scientists think, responding to its own internal rhythms of expansion and retreat? Or was it reacting, through some connection in the ocean perhaps, to the general warming that has taken place almost everywhere else...
Within the past year, scientists watched in awe as a giant ice shelf disintegrated in the Antarctic Peninsula in just over one month's time, and in a remote region of West Antarctica, satellites have detected an expanse where glaciers are worrisomely speeding up their transport...
ICEMARE: ROSS ICE SHELF...