Abstract
The East Antarctic ice sheet is likely more stable than its West Antarctic
counterpart because its bed is largely lying above sea level. However, the
ice sheet in Dronning Maud Land, East Antarctica, contains marine sectors
that are in contact with the ocean through overdeepened marine basins
interspersed by grounded ice promontories and ice rises, pinning and
stabilising the ice shelves. In this paper, we use the ice-sheet model
BISICLES to investigate the effect of sub-ice-shelf melting, using a series
of scenarios compliant with current values, on the ice-dynamic stability of
the outlet glaciers between the Lazarev and Roi Baudouin ice shelves over the
next millennium. Overall, the sub-ice-shelf melting substantially impacts the
sea-level contribution. Locally, we predict a short-term rapid grounding-line
retreat of the overdeepened outlet glacier Hansenbreen, which further induces
the transition of the bordering ice promontories into ice rises. Furthermore,
our analysis demonstrated that the onset of the marine ice-sheet retreat and
subsequent promontory transition into ice rise is controlled by small pinning
points, mostly uncharted in pan-Antarctic datasets. Pinning points have a
twofold impact on marine ice sheets. They decrease the ice discharge by
buttressing effect, and they play a crucial role in initialising marine ice sheets
through data assimilation, leading to errors in ice-shelf rheology when
omitted. Our results show that unpinning increases the sea-level rise by
10 %, while omitting the same pinning point in data assimilation decreases it by
10 %, but the more striking effect is in the promontory transition time,
advanced by two centuries for unpinning and delayed by almost half a
millennium when the pinning point is missing in data assimilation. Pinning
points exert a subtle influence on ice dynamics at the kilometre scale, which
calls for a better knowledge of the Antarctic margins.
Citation
ID:
130753
Ref Key:
favier2016thedynamic