Ocean-ice data from an Antarctic ice shelf water plume flowing beneath land-fast sea ice

Data from a measurement campaign examining the oceanic connection between an ice shelf cavity and sea ice. Here we present data from the ocean boundary-layer in an Ice Shelf Water outflow region from the Ross/McMurdo Ice Shelves. From a fast ice field camp during the Spring of 2015, we captured the kinematics of free-floating relatively large (in some cases 10s of mm in scale) ice crystals that were advecting and then settling upwards in a depositional layer on the sea ice underside (SIPL, sub-ice platelet layer). Simultaneously, we measured the background oceanic temperature, salinity, currents and turbulence structure. At the camp location the total water depth was 536 m, with the uppermost 50 m of the water column being in-situ super-cooled. Tidal flow speeds had an amplitude of around 0.1 m s-1 with dissipation rates in the under-ice boundary layer measured to be up to e=10-6 W kg-1. Acoustic sampling (200 kHz) identified backscatter from large, individually identifiable suspended crystals associated with crystal sizes larger than normally described as frazil. Crystal sizes in the SIPL were also measured.