The Amundsen Sea is an arm of the Southern Ocean off Marie Byrd Land in western Antarctica. It is bounded by Thurston Island to the east and Cape Dart to the west. Named for the Norwegian polar explorer Roald Amundsen by the Norwegian expedition of 1928-29, under Captain Nils Larsen, while exploring this area in February, 1929. The sea is mostly ice-covered, and the Thwaites Ice Tongue protrudes into it. The ice-covered area of the sea, averaging about 3 km (2 miles) in thickness and roughly the size of the state of Texas, is called the Amundsen Sea Embayment; it forms one of the three major ice drainage basins of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, the others being the Ross Sea Embayment and the Weddell Sea Embayment. In March of 2007, scientists studying the ASE through satellite and airborne surveys announced a significant thinning of the ASE, due to shifts in wind patterns that allow warmer waters to flow beneath the ice sheet.
References
- Lubin, Dan, and Robert Massom. Polar Remote Sensing. New York, Springer, 2006.
- Schnellnhuber, Hans Joachim, et al., eds. Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006.
