1 Introduction Antarctic ice shelves lose 2400–2800 Gt of mass every year (Depoorter et al., 2013; Rignot et al., 2013). Ice calving, the falling down of ice chunks from the edge of a glacier, has long been considered an important process responsible for the loss of ice shelves (Jacobs et al., 1992; Depoorter et al., 2013). Along with ice calving, recent studies have suggested that basal melting, i.e., melting at depth by warm seawater, is equally responsible for the loss of ice shelves.
