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The Impact of Melting Ice on Ocean Waters

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The Impact of Melting Ice on Ocean Waters 2370 JOURNAL OF PHYSICAL OCEANOGRAPHY VOLUME 29 The Impact of Melting Ice on Ocean Waters ADRIAN JENKINS British Antarctic Survey, Natural Environment Research Council, Cambridge, United Kingdom (Manuscript received 12 September 1997, in ®nal form 29 October 1998) ABSTRACT Ice melts when it is in contact with ocean waters that have temperatures above the in situ freezing point. The product is a mixture of meltwater and seawater having properties intermediate between those of the two com- ponents. Density is one of the properties that is affected, and this has important implications for how the melt- induced changes are eventually manifested. Although the direct impact of melting is to cool and dilute the ocean, subsequent convection can carry the products of melting to parts of the water column where they are comparatively warm and salty. These principles are illustrated with a set of observations from the continental shelf of the Amundsen Sea. Measurements made near a ¯oating glacier are used to calculate the concentration of meltwater in the water column. Concentrations approaching 2% are associated with comparatively high temperatures, low dissolved oxygen concentrations, and negligible stable isotope anomalies. The impact of drifting icebergs on the Southern Ocean is discussed. Over most of the area to the south of the Polar Front, melting effects a transfer of heat from the Circumpolar Deep Water to the overlying winter water. The resultant net heat ¯ux over the entire area is small, but locally it may exceed 100 W m22. 1. Introduction in air, and a low speci®c enthalpy. The latter is a less convenient thermodynamic variable to work with than Runoff from the Antarctic Ice Sheet annually con- 15 potential temperature, but temperature is not conserved tributes about 2.6 3 10 kg of freshwater to the South- according to (1). When ice is added to it, the ocean is ern Ocean (Jacobs et al. 1992). All but about 2% of this cooled by three distinct processes: heat conduction from discharge enters the ocean as ice, which subsequently water to ice that serves to warm the ice from its far- melts over a wide area. This paper addresses the impact ®eld temperature, ui, to the freezing point, uf , absorption of the melting process on seawater properties. Through- of latent heat during the phase change, and subsequent out the analysis, the ice±seawater system is assumed to mixing of the meltwater, which has a temperature equal be closed, precluding any consideration of atmospheric to the freezing point, with the ambient water. This leads in¯uence on either ice or seawater. The discussion is to an effective potential temperature de®ned by therefore applicable only to processes occurring below the surface mixed layer. Conservative properties of a Lci u*if5 u 22(u fi2 u ) (2) meltwater±seawater mixture, x, are then determined ccpp simply by the mass of ice, Q , and of water, Q , that i w that appears in place of in the potential temperature contribute to the mixture, and by the properties of the ui form of Eq. (1) (Gade 1979). In (2), c and c represent two components, x and x : i p i w the speci®c heat capacities of ice and seawater, respec- Qx 5 Qwxw 1 Qixi, (1) tively, at constant pressure, and L is the latent heat of fusion. where Q 5 Qi 1 Qw is the total mass of the mixture. Useful tracers of melting ice are those displaying a Among the properties of ice that impart distinctive large ice±seawater contrast and, because this difference characteristics to the water into which it melts are a is normally much larger than any spatial variations with- negligible salinity, a pronounced depletion in the iso- in the ice sheet, a mass of ¯oating ice can generally be topically heavy forms of water, a mixture of incorpo- regarded as being uniform. If the seawater can also be rated gases that is closely related to their concentrations assumed to be uniform and both ice and ambient water properties are known, (1) can be used to derive the meltwater content associated with any particular obser- vation x: Corresponding author address: Dr. Adrian Jenkins, British Ant- arctic Survey, Natural Environment Research Council, High Cross, Qiwx 2 x Madingley Rd., Cambridge CB3 OET, United Kingdom. 5 . (3) E-mail: [email protected] Q xwi2 x q 1999 American Meteorological Society SEPTEMBER 1999 JENKINS 2371 Weddell Seas has been attributed to melting at the base of the large ice shelves that cover the southern extrem- ities of the continental shelves (Jacobs et al. 1970; Schlosser 1986), and a combination of stable isotope and helium data have been used to calculate the fraction of meltwater contained in ice shelf water (ISW) and Weddell Sea Bottom Water (Schlosser et al. 1990; Wep- pernig et al. 1996). The in¯uence of melting ice on a nonuniform water column can be complex because the cooling and dilution brought about by melting entail changes in the seawater density. To quantify the observable impact of melting, it is necessary to compare the properties of a meltwater± seawater mixture with those found at its equilibrium level in the ambient strati®cation, rather than with those of the source water. This was recognized by Neshyba (1977), who suggested the possibility of drifting ice- bergs leaving a trail of nutrient-rich surface water in their wake. His argument was not that the ice was rich in nutrients, but that upwelling caused by melting would raise nutrient-rich waters from below the pycnocline. FIG. 1. Bivariate plot illustrating observed properties (x1, x2) pro- Jenkins (1993) used simple plume theory to model the 12 duced as ice with properties (xxii , ), melts into a single water type, 12 upwelling induced by melting icebergs and demonstrat- having properties (xxww , ). The locus of all possible observations forms the straight line drawn between the ambient and ice properties. ed the possibility of local warming of the water column, Numbered points indicate the meltwater fractions associated with a phenomenon observed by Potter et al. (1988) and Hell- selected positions on the mixing line. mer et al. (1998). These latter observations highlight the problems of interpreting measurements made in a nonuniform environment. It follows that mixtures of meltwater and seawater will This paper describes a method for calculating melt- have conservative properties that plot as a straight line water concentrations that permits the assumption of non- on a bivariate graph (Fig. 1). In this idealized situation, uniform ambient properties. The analysis follows that the impact of melting ice is easily discerned and the used by McDougall (1990) to evaluate the impact of concentration of meltwater associated with any partic- ``hot smokers'' on an arbitrary, linearly strati®ed water ular observation can be determined from where the mea- column. Observations from the continental shelf of the surement falls on the mixing line. Should one of the Amundsen Sea provide an illustrative example of how two properties be unknown in either the ice or the am- the method may be applied. The same principles are bient water, extrapolation of the mixing line to concen- then used to evaluate the impact of melting ice on the trations of zero or one can be used to evaluate the un- near-surface waters of the Southern Ocean by a consid- known properties. eration of how scalar properties evolve on isopycnal These principles have been used in many studies of surfaces. ocean waters under the in¯uence of melting ice. The slope of the meltwater mixing line in potential temper- 2. Melting into a nonuniform environment ature±salinity (u±S) space has been derived by a number of authors (Gade 1979; Greisman 1979; Nùst and Fold- In the presence of arbitrary variations in ambient wa- vik 1994). Nùst and ésterhus (1998) used this knowl- ter properties, xw cannot be assumed constant and cal- edge to infer changes in the salinity of waters causing culation of the meltwater fraction using (3) is no longer melting beneath an ice shelf. They assumed that the possible. The change in density caused by melting drives temperature of the source waters would always corre- convective motion near the ice, and this in turn causes spond to the surface freezing point and extrapolated the mixing and further melting. As a result ambient waters mixing lines passing through measured u±S character- with a whole range of properties are combined with the istics of out¯ows observed at different times to their meltwater in unknown quantities to produce the ®nal intersections with the freezing point curve. The d18O± observation, x. This section shows how progress can be salinity trend has also been used to study the evolution made under an assumption much less restrictive than of water masses near ice shelves and to calculate the that of constant xw. The requirement will be for two mean isotope ratio of melting ice by extrapolation of properties whose trends throughout the ambient waters the mixing line to zero salinity (Weiss et al. 1979; Potter are linearly related. et al. 1984; Jacobs at al. 1985). Enrichment of dissolved On the continental shelves of the Ross and Weddell oxygen and helium in water masses in the Ross and Seas the ambient waters are close to the surface freezing 2372 JOURNAL OF PHYSICAL OCEANOGRAPHY VOLUME 29 point almost everywhere, so potential temperature and salinity are approximately linearly related. On the shelves of the Amundsen and Bellingshausen Seas and in the upper levels of the deep ocean basins around Antarctica, where many icebergs melt, the ambient wa- ter column consists of Antarctic Surface Water (AASW) overlying a temperature maximum core of Circumpolar Deep Water (CDW).
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