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Effects of calving and submarine melting on steady states and stability of buttressed marine ice sheets



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  • Journal Title:
    Journal of Glaciology
  • Personal Author:
  • NOAA Program & Office:
  • Description:
    Mass loss from ice shelves is a strong control on grounding-line dynamics. Here we investigate how calving and submarine melt parameterizations affect steady-state grounding-line positions and their stability. Our results indicate that different calving laws with the same melt parameterization result in more diverse steady-state ice-sheet configurations than different melt parameterizations with the same calving law. We show that the backstress at the grounding line depends on the integrated ice-shelf mass flux. Consequently, ice shelves are most sensitive to high melt rates in the vicinity of their grounding lines. For the same shelf-averaged melt rates, different melt parameterizations can lead to very different ice-shelf configurations and grounding-line positions. If the melt rate depends on the slope of the ice-shelf draft, then the positive feedback between increased melting and steepening of the slope can lead to singular melt rates at the ice-shelf front, producing an apparent lower limit of the shelf front thickness as the ice thickness vanishes over a small boundary layer. Our results illustrate that the evolution of marine ice sheets is highly dependent on ice-shelf mass loss mechanisms, and that existing parameterizations can lead to a wide range of modelled grounding-line behaviours.
  • Keywords:
  • Source:
    Journal of Glaciology , First View , pp. 1 - 18
  • DOI:
  • Document Type:
    Journal Article
  • Funding:
    Grant no. NA18OAR4320123
  • Rights Information:
    CC BY
  • Compliance:
    Submitted
  • Main Document Checksum:
    urn:sha256:1f09fa5ee12dcbdf277a44914f02365aa94832f14f69e8f25e6b79b1ae24898a
  • Download URL:
  • File Type:
    Filetype[PDF - 2.20 MB ]
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