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Sea-level feedback lowers projections of future Antarctic Ice-Sheet mass loss



Details

  • Journal Title:
    Nature Communications
  • Personal Author:
  • NOAA Program & Office:
  • Description:
    The stability of marine sectors of the Antarctic Ice Sheet (AIS) in a warming climate has been identified as the largest source of uncertainty in projections of future sea-level rise. Sea-level fall near the grounding line of a retreating marine ice sheet has a stabilizing influence on the ice sheets, and previous studies have established the importance of this feedback on ice age AIS evolution. Here we use a coupled ice sheet–sea-level model to investigate the impact of the feedback mechanism on future AIS retreat over centennial and millennial timescales for a range of emission scenarios. We show that the combination of bedrock uplift and sea-surface drop associated with ice-sheet retreat significantly reduces AIS mass loss relative to a simulation without these effects included. Sensitivity analyses show that the stabilization tends to be greatest for lower emission scenarios and Earth models characterized by a thin elastic lithosphere and low-viscosity upper mantle, as is the case for West Antarctica.
  • Keywords:
  • Source:
    Nat Commun. 2015; 6: 8798.
  • DOI:
  • Pubmed ID:
    26554381
  • Pubmed Central ID:
    PMC5426515
  • Document Type:
    Journal Article
  • Funding:
    Grant no. NA13OAR4310100
  • Place as Subject:
    Antarctica
  • Rights Information:
    CC BY
  • Compliance:
    PMC
  • Main Document Checksum:
    urn:sha256:d32a5f0b362c8b318d2595049f1f1e3aaa2d8deba84d07e108aef62ccca3f39a
  • Download URL:
  • File Type:
    Filetype[PDF - 973.17 KB ]
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