Improved Bathymetry Resolution in the Ross Sea from Aerogravity and Magnetics: Examples from Operation IceBridge.

The Ross Ice Shelf, located in the embayment between East and West Antarctica, is one of the largest underexplored patches of ocean on the planet. Sediment cores show that the Ross Ice Shelf can disintegrate during some interglacial periods. The conditions required for sudden collapse are not well constrained. A key to understanding the dynamics and long-term stability of the Ross Ice Shelf system is having high-resolution constraints on its boundary conditions, including sea floor bathymetry. The sea floor under the Ross Ice Shelf has developed in response to both the tectonic development of the West Antarctic Rift and the glacial signature of the waxing and waning Antarctic Ice Sheets. A mixture of fabrics and orientations in its bathymetry reflect this complex development.

However, present oceanographic models of water circulation under the ice are based on low-resolution bathymetric maps drawn from stations spaced 55 km apart obtained during the RIGGS project in the 1970s. In contrast, most of the bathymetry of the world’s oceans has been mapped to approximately 15 km resolution from satellite altimetry and much higher resolution from acoustic surveys. Improvement of Ross Ice Shelf bathymetry can be achieved from combined analysis and inversion of gravity and magnetic data acquired from airborne surveys over the Ross Ice Shelf. Survey lines flown in 2013 by Operation IceBridge, with the Sander Geophysics Ltd AIRGrav system over the central and northern Ross Embayment provide a tenfold increase, to 5 km, of the along track resolution of bathymetry. Newly resolved bathymetric highs and lows have amplitudes of up to 200 km. Combining the gravity and magnetic surveys also reveals the differing geology across the embayment. Results from these surveys, including comparison with ship-based bathymetry data from the Ross Sea, demonstrate the value of gravity and magnetic surveys for mapping the bathymetry of the Ross Ice Shelf and the need for more comprehensive airborne surveys of the region.