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Ice-sheet losses track high-end sea-level rise projections

Nature Climate Change volume 10, pages 879–881 (2020)Cite this article

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Observed ice-sheet losses track the upper range of the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report sea-level predictions, recently driven by ice dynamics in Antarctica and surface melting in Greenland. Ice-sheet models must account for short-term variability in the atmosphere, oceans and climate to accurately predict sea-level rise.

The Antarctic and Greenland ice-sheets contain enough water to raise global sea levels by 58 m (ref. 1) and 7 m (ref. 2), respectively. As the largest source of potential sea-level rise (SLR)3, modest losses from these ice sheets will increase coastal flooding4 and affect oceans through freshwater input5. Accurately forecasting SLR improves flood risk assessment and adaptation. Since the satellite record began in the 1990s, Antarctica and Greenland together have raised global sea levels by 17.8 mm, and the volume of ice lost has increased over time1,2. Of this, 7.2 mm originate from Antarctica where ocean-driven melting and ice-shelf collapse have accelerated ice flow1; the remaining 10.6 mm come from Greenland, which, despite holding less ice, accounts for 60% of the recent ice-sheet contribution as oceanic and atmospheric warming have increased ice discharge and surface meltwater runoff2. We compare observations of Antarctic1 and Greenland mass change2 to IPCC Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) SLR projections3 during their 10-year overlap, and we assess model skill in predicting ice dynamic and surface mass change.

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Fig. 1: Observed and predicted sea-level contribution from Antarctic and Greenland ice-sheet mass change.
Fig. 2: Observed and predicted annual rates of sea-level rise from Antarctic and Greenland ice-sheet mass change and their individual ice dynamic and surface mass components.

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Acknowledgements

This work is an outcome of the Ice-sheet Mass Balance Inter-Comparison Exercise (IMBIE) supported by the ESA Climate Change Initiative and the NASA Cryosphere Program. T.S. was funded by the NERC Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling through a Natural Environment Research Council (cpom300001) grant, and A.E.H. was funded by a NERC Fellowship (NE/R012407/1). R.M. acknowledges the support of the ESA CCI+ for Greenland ice-sheet under ESA-ESRIN contract number 4000104815/11/I-NB and the Danish State through the National Centre for Climate Research (NCKF). We thank the European Space Agency, National Aeronautics Space Administration and the German Aerospace Centre for provision of satellite data, without which this study would not have been possible. We also thank A. Shepherd for leading IMBIE, which produced the reconciled observations of ice-sheet mass change, and for useful discussions during the course of this study. The satellite data used here are freely available at http://imbie.org/data-downloads/, and IPCC sea-level rise projections can be downloaded from http://www.climatechange2013.org/report/full-report.

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  1. Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling, School of Earth and Environment, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK

    Thomas Slater

  2. School of Earth and Environment, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK

    Anna E. Hogg

  3. Danish Meteorological Institute, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Ruth Mottram

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  1. Thomas Slater
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Correspondence to Thomas Slater.

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Slater, T., Hogg, A.E. & Mottram, R. Ice-sheet losses track high-end sea-level rise projections. Nat. Clim. Chang. 10, 879–881 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-020-0893-y

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