What is happening to the West Antarctic ice sheet?

West Antarctica is a tighly coupled, dynamic environment. The size of the ice sheet depends on iceberg calving, and subglacial melting and freezing. Under the floating ice shelves, circulating waters year and freeze on large volumes of marine ice. The shape of the ice sheet depends on ice-flow, which vary the slow interior to the rapidly sliding ice streams. Subglacial water and till properties strongly influence the most stable locations for deposition and englacial archiving of past atmospheric samples. The isolated mountains that are high enough to emerge from the ice-sheet surface and on the floors of the seas shelf.