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Sea level as a stabilizing factor for marine-ice-sheet grounding lines

Nature Geoscience volume 3, pages 850–853 (2010)Cite this article

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Abstract

Climate change could potentially destabilize marine ice sheets, which would affect projections of future sea-level rise1,2,3,4. Specifically, an instability mechanism5,6,7,8 has been predicted for marine ice sheets such as the West Antarctic ice sheet that rest on reversed bed slopes, whereby ice-sheet thinning or rising sea level leads to irreversible retreat of the grounding line. However, existing analyses of this instability mechanism have not accounted for deformational and gravitational effects that lead to a sea-level fall at the margin of a rapidly shrinking ice sheet9,10,11. Here we present a suite of predictions of gravitationally self-consistent sea-level change following grounding-line migration. Our predictions vary the initial ice-sheet size and also consider the contribution to sea-level change from various subregions of the simulated ice sheet. Using these results, we revisit a canonical analysis of marine-ice-sheet stability5 and demonstrate that gravity and deformation-induced sea-level changes local to the grounding line contribute a stabilizing influence on ice sheets grounded on reversed bed slopes. We conclude that accurate treatments of sea-level change should be incorporated into analyses of past and future marine-ice-sheet dynamics.

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Figure 1: A summary of the Weertman analysis of ice-sheet stability.
Figure 2: Sea-level changes following grounding-line migration.
Figure 3: Revised analysis of marine-ice-sheet stability based on a theory (equation (2)) that includes GSCSL change.

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Acknowledgements

This research was financially supported by Harvard University, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (N.G.), the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (J.X.M.), the Packard Foundation (P.H.) and the National Science Foundation (P.U.C.). We thank D. Pollard for comments that helped to improve this manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Harvard University, 20 Oxford Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA

    Natalya Gomez, Jerry X. Mitrovica & Peter Huybers

  2. Department of Geosciences, Oregon State University, Corvallis, Oregon 97331, USA

    Peter U. Clark

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  1. Natalya Gomez
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  2. Jerry X. Mitrovica
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  3. Peter Huybers
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  4. Peter U. Clark
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Contributions

N.G. and J.X.M. were responsible for the sea-level modelling and all authors contributed to the modelling and discussion of ice-sheet stability and the writing and editing of the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Natalya Gomez.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Gomez, N., Mitrovica, J., Huybers, P. et al. Sea level as a stabilizing factor for marine-ice-sheet grounding lines. Nature Geosci 3, 850–853 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo1012

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