Collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet after local destabilization of the Amundsen Basin

Published: Feb 1, 2016 by The PISM Authors


Title	Collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet after local destabilization of the Amundsen Basin
Authors	J. Feldmann and A. Levermann
Venue	Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

This prominent paper uses a PISM simulation to show how a localized destabilization in the Amundsen Sea sector of West Antarctica causes a complete disintegration of the marine ice in West Antarctica. In these 5-km horizontal resolution simulations, the region disequilibrates after 60 y of currently-observed sub-shelft melt rates. Thereafter the marine ice-sheet instability fully unfolds and is not halted by topographic features. In fact, the ice loss in Amundsen Sea sector shifts the catchment’s ice divide toward the Filchner–Ronne and Ross ice shelves, which initiates grounding-line retreat there. Our simulations suggest that if a destabilization of Amundsen Sea sector has indeed been initiated, Antarctica will irrevocably contribute at least 3 m to global sea-level rise during the coming centuries to millennia. See the videos linked in this news item.

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Two PhD fellowship positions in ice sheet modelling are advertised at the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen.

The Alfred Wegener Institute, Bremerhaven, is offering a PhD position in the field of coupled ice sheet-ocean modelling. The core of the project is to run simulations with FESOM-PISM (a coupled ocean-ice shelf-ice sheet model with evolving cavity geometries) for different 21st-century climate projections to obtain well-constrained trajectories of future ice mass loss from the vast Antarctic Ice Sheet. Model results will feed into a fingerprinting method that considers the ocean response as well as gravitational effects and contributions from other sources. The final product will be a time series of global maps of regional sea-level variations that consider all of the most relevant processes.