Thickness of floating ice shelves in Antarctica. Ice thickness is greatest close to the grounding line where it can reach 1000 meters or more (red). Away from the grounding line, the ice rapidly thins to reach a few hundreds of meters at the calving front. Ice thickness varies greatly from one ice shelf to another. Within ice shelves, “streams of ice” can be spotted originating from individual tributary glaciers and ice streams.
This dataset was used to compute calving fluxes and basal melt rates of Antarctic ice shelves (see Depoorter et al, 2013). This ice thickness map was derived from altimetry data (ERS and ICESat) acquired between 1994 and 2009 and corrected for elevation changes during this period.
Follow this link to download the georeferenced map and see Depoorter et al (2013)‘s paper for more information.
