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The ice shelves in the Amundsen Sea are thinning rapidly, and the main reason for their decline appears to be warm ocean currents circulating below the ice shelves and melting these from below. Ocean currents transport warm dense water onto the shelf, channeled by bathymetric troughs leading to the deep inner basins. A hydrographic mooring equipped with an upward-looking ADCP has been placed in one of these troughs on the central Amundsen shelf. The two years (2010/11) of mooring data are here used to characterize the inflow of warm deep water to the deep shelf basins. During both years, the warm layer thickness and temperature peaked in austral fall. The along-trough velocity is dominated by strong fluctuations that do not vary in the vertical. These fluctuations are correlated with the local wind, with eastward wind over the shelf and shelf break giving flow toward the ice shelves. In addition, there is a persistent flow of dense lower Circumpolar Deep Water (CDW) toward the ice shelves in the bottom layer. This bottom-intensified flow appears to be driven by buoyancy forces rather than the shelfbreak wind. The years of 2010 and 2011 were characterized by a comparatively stationary Amundsen Sea low, and hence there were no strong eastward winds during winter that could drive an upwelling of warm water along the shelf break. Regardless of this, there was a persistent flow of lower CDW in the bottom layer during the two years. The average heat transport toward the ice shelves in the trough was estimated from the mooring data to be 0.95 TW.

The thinning and acceleration of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet has been attributed to basal melting induced by intrusions of relatively warm salty water across the continental shelf. A hydrographic section including lowered acoustic Doppler current profiler measurements showing such an inflow in the channel leading to the Getz and Dotson Ice Shelves is presented here. The flow rate was 0.3-0.4 Sv (1 Sv [ 10 6 m 3 s 21 ), and the subsurface heat loss was estimated to be 1.2-1.6 TW. Assuming that the inflow persists throughout the year, it corresponds to an ice melt of 110-130 km 3 yr 21 , which exceeds recent estimates of the net ice glacier ice volume loss in the Amundsen Sea. The results also show a 100-150-m-thick intermediate water mass consisting of Circumpolar Deep Water that has been modified (cooled and freshened) by subsurface melting of ice shelves and/or icebergs. This water mass has not previously been reported in the region, possibly because of the paucity of historical data.

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