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Climate variability a key driver of recent Antarctic ice-mass change

Nature Geoscience volume 16, pages 1128–1135 (2023)Cite this article

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Abstract

Multiple datasets show the Antarctic Ice Sheet has lost mass over recent decades and therefore contributed to sea-level rise. Short-term variability in ice mass has been associated partly with El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO), for both the grounded ice sheet and its bounding ice shelves, but a connection with the Southern Annular Mode—the dominant climate mode in the region—is not fully clear. Here we show that satellite-based gravimetric estimates of ice-mass variability between 2002 and 2021 can be largely explained by a simple linear relation with both the Southern Annular Mode and lagged ENSO. Multiple linear regression reveals that the cumulative effects of the Southern Annular Mode and/or ENSO explain much of the decadal variability from the whole ice sheet down to individual drainage basins. A substantial portion of the net change in ice mass across the whole ice sheet between 2002 and 2021 can be attributed to a persistent forcing from a positive Southern Annular Mode. Understanding the drivers of variability in the Southern Annular Mode over this period, which are largely anthropogenic over multidecadal timescales, may be a pathway to partially attributing ice-sheet change to human activity.

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Fig. 1: Leading modes of Antarctic mass change.
Fig. 2: Results of multivariate regression.
Fig. 3: Nonlinear ice-sheet mass change.
Fig. 4: Ice-sheet GRACE linear trends.

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Data availability

All data are publicly available from the locations linked in the Methods section. The datasets generated and/or analysed during the current study are available at https://doi.org/10.25959/8MW6-ZN03.

Code availability

Code used to analyse the data and prepare figures will be made available upon request.

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Acknowledgements

This study was supported by the Centre for Southern Hemisphere Oceans Research (CSHOR), jointly funded by the Qingdao National Laboratory for Marine Science and Technology (QNLM, China) and the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO, Australia), and by the Australian Research Council Special Research Initiative, Australian Centre for Excellence in Antarctic Science (project number SR200100008). We thank C. Watson and R. Coleman for helpful discussions on the analysis and interpretation and L. Padman for constructive reviews. We thank the GravIS team for supplying GRACE data. Grant funding: SR200100008 (M.A.K.).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Geography, Planning, and Spatial Sciences, University of Tasmania, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia

    Matt A. King & Kewei Lyu

  2. The Australian Centre for Excellence in Antarctic Science, University of Tasmania, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia

    Matt A. King

  3. State Key Laboratory of Marine Environmental Science, College of Ocean and Earth Sciences, Xiamen University, Xiamen, China

    Kewei Lyu

  4. Climate Science Centre, CSIRO Environment, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia

    Xuebin Zhang

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M.A.K. conceived the study, led the analysis and drafted the manuscript. K.L. performed the initial EOF and regression analysis and developed the use of the integrated climate indices. X.Z. assisted with the interpretation. All authors commented on the paper.

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Correspondence to Matt A. King.

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Nature Geoscience thanks Laurence Padman, Kyle Clem and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work. Primary Handling Editor: Tom Richardson, in collaboration with the Nature Geoscience team.

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King, M.A., Lyu, K. & Zhang, X. Climate variability a key driver of recent Antarctic ice-mass change. Nat. Geosci. 16, 1128–1135 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-023-01317-w

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