Cruises from Amundsen Trough
Lying in the northwestern Arctic waterways, and 600km east of the Alaskan Canadian border, is found the Amundsen Trough. This submarine glacial trough in the Amundsen Sea is deemed responsible for the ice shelves thinning rapidly. The main reason for this is attributed to warm ocean currents travelling through the trough and then circulating below the ice shelves and melting these from below. The strong fluctuations of the along-trough velocity, correlated with the local eastward wind over the shelf, are considered enough to account for most of the basal melting in the entire region. Read more
This suggests that the ocean is supplying an excess of heat toward the Arctic continent.