Retreat of Pine Island Glacier controlled by marine ice-sheet instability
Favier, L; Durand, G; Cornford, Stephen; et al.Gudmundsson, GH; Gagliardini, O; Gillet-Chaulet, F; Zwinger, T; Payne, AJ; Le Brocq, A.M.
Date: 1 February 2014
Journal
Nature Climate Change
Publisher
Nature Publishing Group
Publisher DOI
Abstract
Over the past 40 years Pine Island Glacier in West Antarctica has thinned at an accelerating rate, so that at present it is
the largest single contributor to sea-level rise in Antarctica. In recent years, the grounding line, which separates the grounded ice sheet from the floating ice shelf, has retreated by tens
of kilometres. At ...
Over the past 40 years Pine Island Glacier in West Antarctica has thinned at an accelerating rate, so that at present it is
the largest single contributor to sea-level rise in Antarctica. In recent years, the grounding line, which separates the grounded ice sheet from the floating ice shelf, has retreated by tens
of kilometres. At present, the grounding line is crossing a retrograde bedrock slope that lies well below sea level, raising
the possibility that the glacier is susceptible to the marine ice-sheet instability mechanism. Here, using three state-ofthe-
art ice-flow models, we show that Pine Island Glacier’s grounding line is probably engaged in an unstable 40 km
retreat. The associated mass loss increases substantially over the course of our simulations from the average value of
20 Gt yr1 observed for the 1992–2011 period, up to and above 100 Gt yr1, equivalent to 3.5–10mm eustatic sea-level rise over the following 20 years. Mass loss remains elevated from
then on, ranging from 60 to 120 Gt yr1.
Geography - old structure
Collections of Former Colleges
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