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| Titel |
Retreat of Pine Island Glacier controlled by marine ice-sheet instability |
| VerfasserIn |
Gael Durand, Lionel Favier, Stephen Cornford, Hilmar Gudmundsson, Olivier Gagliardini, Fabien Gillet-Chaulet, Thomas Zwinger, Anthony Payne, Anne Le Brocq |
| Konferenz |
EGU General Assembly 2014
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| Medientyp |
Artikel
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| Sprache |
Englisch
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| Digitales Dokument |
PDF |
| Erschienen |
In: GRA - Volume 16 (2014) |
| Datensatznummer |
250092739
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| Publikation (Nr.) |
 EGU/EGU2014-7098.pdf |
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| Zusammenfassung |
| Over the last 40 years Pine Island Glacier in West Antarctica has thinned at an
accelerating rate, so that it is currently 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-of-the-art ice flow models, we show that Pine
Island Glacier’s grounding line is likely engaged in an unstable 40 kilometre retreat.
The associated mass loss increases substantially over the course of our simulations
from the average value of 20Gta-1 observed for the 1992-2011 period , up to
and above 100Gta-1 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
120Gta-1. |
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