In a new Nature Communications paper, researchers at Victoria University and the University of New South Wales describe a model study of Antarctic ice sheet evolution over the last 25 kyr using PISM with ocean-forcing inputs from the Earth system model LOVECLIM. They show that when the ocean around Antarctica becomes more stratified, warm water at depth melts the ice sheet faster than when the ocean is less stratified.
In a just-published Nature Climate Change article, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research authors Matthias Mengel and Anders Levermann use PISM to define the “ice-plug” which, if removed from the coastal ice in the Wilkes Basin of East Antarctica, would initiate irreversible retreat of the grounded ice in that basin. The modeled retreats, which occur on a time scale of a few thousand years, generate 3–4 m of sea level rise from the region surrounding the basin. Thus this basin is a potential “tipping-point” ice sheet configuration, in additional to the better-known West Antarctica configurations.
Only fixes and improvements that should not break existing functionality are included in this release. We recommend updating from v0.6 unless you have a good reason against it. Upgrade by doing “git pull” in the PISM source tree. (Or get a new tagged “.tar.gz” or “.zip” at github.com/pism/pism/releases.) Then do “make install” in the build directory.
See the stable version page to check out a copy of the PISM stable0.6 source code. If you have already checked out the prerelease version, just do git pull and then make install in your build directory. Send email to help@pism-docs.org for help with any version of PISM.