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The future is Nye: an extension of the perfect plastic approximation to tidewater glaciers



Details

  • Journal Title:
    Journal of Glaciology
  • Personal Author:
  • NOAA Program & Office:
    OAR (Oceanic and Atmospheric Research)
  • Description:
    Accurate modeling of calving glaciers relies on knowledge of many processes (ice flow, surface/submarine melting, calving, mélange interaction) and glacier-specific factors (air temperature, ocean circulation, precipitation rate, glacier geometry) that remain challenging to assess. Iceberg calving, especially, is important to glacier mass loss and difficult to resolve in currently-available models. Given these challenges facing even the most sophisticated models, there is value in simple, computationally-efficient models that can capture first-order effects. In this study we derive a simple model, extending Nye's perfect plastic approximation to include a yield surface at the calving front. With one climate-related input—either an upstream glacier thinning rate or glacier-wide accumulation—this model is able to simulate the advance and retreat of marine-terminating glaciers on annual to decadal scales. Our model requires knowledge of only two glacier-specific factors: glacier bed topography and basal shear strength, both reasonably constrained by laboratory and field observations. We apply the model to a case study of Columbia Glacier, Alaska and show that, despite its simplicity, the model succeeds in reproducing observed centerline profiles and rates of terminus retreat up to 2007.
  • Keywords:
  • Source:
    J. Glaciology. Aug 2018; 62(236): 1143-1152
  • DOI:
  • Document Type:
    Journal Article
  • Funding:
    Grant no. NA13OAR4310096
  • Rights Information:
    CC BY
  • Compliance:
    Submitted
  • Main Document Checksum:
    urn:sha-512:aa0466f6435161481b949a86cc8c2043e205482fc567d56632e51cbdae3c12d1d8785f63bf7f92960ff129ce5f7cf4a3ec4d70c278dca7351bbb5439ca720d4f
  • Download URL:
  • File Type:
    Filetype[PDF - 459.83 KB ]
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