Friedrichs, Drew M.McInerney, Jasmin B. T.Oldroyd, Holly J.Lee, Won SangYun, SukyoungYoon, Seung-TaeStevens, Craig L.Zappa, Christopher J.Dow, Christine F.Mueller, DerekSteiner, Oscar SepulvedaForrest, Alexander L.2024-09-062024-09-062022-06-22https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-022-00460-3https://hdl.handle.net/10012/20970This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.Antarctica’s ice shelves buttress the continent’s terrestrial ice, helping slow the loss of grounded ice into the ocean and limiting sea level rise. Ice-ocean interaction plays a critical role in ice shelf stability by driving basal melt rates. Consequently, improved prediction of the future state of ice shelves lies in understanding the coastal ocean mechanics that deliver heat to their cavities. Here, we present autonomous glider-based observations of a coherent structure at the calving front of a cold-water cavity ice shelf (Nansen Ice Shelf, East Antarctica). This ~10 km-wide eddy dominated the local ocean circulation in the austral summer of 2018/2019, promoting an upwelling of cold ice shelf water and a deepening of warm surface water. Microstructure turbulence measurements show a resulting maximum vertical heat transport of 10 W m−2 at depths equivalent to the ice shelf draft. Similar eddy-driven heat transport further into the ice shelf cavity would support enhanced summertime melt in regions of shallower ice draft.enAttribution 4.0 Internationalhttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/cryospheric sciencephysical oceanographyArticle