Geometric amplification and suppression of ice-shelf basal melt in West Antarctica
De Rydt, Jan; Naughten, Kaitlin ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9475-9162. 2024 Geometric amplification and suppression of ice-shelf basal melt in West Antarctica. The Cryosphere, 18 (4). 26, pp. 10.5194/tc-18-1863-2024
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Abstract/Summary
Glaciers along the Amundsen Sea coastline in West Antarctica are dynamically adjusting to a change in ice-shelf mass balance that triggered their retreat and speed-up prior to the satellite era. In recent decades, the ice shelves have continued to thin, albeit at a decelerating rate, whilst ice discharge across the grounding lines has been observed to have increased by up to 100 % since the early 1990s. Here, the ongoing evolution of ice-shelf mass balance components is assessed in a high-resolution coupled ice–ocean model that includes the Pine Island, Thwaites, Crosson, and Dotson ice shelves. For a range of idealized ocean-forcing scenarios, the combined evolution of ice-shelf geometry and basal-melt rates is simulated over a 200-year period. For all ice-shelf cavities, a reconfiguration of the 3D ocean circulation in response to changes in cavity geometry is found to cause significant and sustained changes in basal-melt rate, ranging from a 75 % decrease up to a 75 % increase near the grounding lines, irrespective of the far-field forcing. These previously unexplored feedbacks between changes in ice-shelf geometry, ocean circulation, and basal melting have a demonstrable impact on the net ice-shelf mass balance, including grounding-line discharge, at multi-decadal timescales. They should be considered in future projections of Antarctic mass loss alongside changes in ice-shelf melt due to anthropogenic trends in the ocean temperature and salinity.
Item Type: | Publication - Article |
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Digital Object Identifier (DOI): | 10.5194/tc-18-1863-2024 |
ISSN: | 1994-0424 |
Date made live: | 23 Apr 2024 11:18 +0 (UTC) |
URI: | https://nora.nerc.ac.uk/id/eprint/537327 |
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