The sea ice surrounding Antarctica may be thicker than previously thought. Earlier estimates using shipboard observations and drill cores had suggested that the Southern Ocean ice pack was thinner than 1 meter on average. New measurements, reported November 24 in Nature Geoscience, show ice floes with thicknesses ranging from 1.
4 to 5.5 meters, with some areas as thick as 16 meters.“We have a fairly good sense that this ice may represent a significant portion of the pack,”says study coauthor Ted Maksym, an oceanographer at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts.