A Tale of Two Ice Shelves: Contrasting Behavior During the Regional Destabilization of the Dotson-Crosson Ice Shelf System, West Antarctica
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Dotson Ice Shelf has resisted acceleration and ice-front retreat despite high basal-melt rates and rapid disaggregation of the neighboring Crosson Ice Shelf. Because of this lack of acceleration, previous studies have assumed that Dotson is stable. Here we show clear evidence of Dotson's destabilization as it decelerates, contrary to the common assumption that ice-flow deceleration is synonymous with stability. Ungrounding of a series of pinning points initiated acceleration in the Upper Dotson in the early 2000s, which subsequently slowed ice flow in the Lower Dotson. Discharge from the tributary Kohler Glacier into Crosson increased, but non-proportionally. Using ICESat and ICESat-2 altimetry data we show that ungrounding of the remaining pinning points is linked to a tripling in basal melt rates between 2006-2016 and 2016-2020. Basal melt rates on Crosson doubled over the same period. The higher basal melt at Lower Dotson is consistent with the cyclonic ocean circulation in the Dotson cavity, which tends to lift isopycnals and allow warmer deep water to interact with the ice. Given current surface-lowering rates, we estimate that several remaining pinning points in the Upper Dotson will unground within one to three decades. The grounding line of Kohler Glacier will retreat past a bathymetric saddle by the late 2030s and merge into the Smith West Glacier catchment, raising concern that reconfiguration of regional ice-flow dynamics and new pathways for the intrusion of warm modified Circumpolar Deep Water could further accelerate grounding-line retreat in the Dotson-Crosson Ice Shelf System.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".