Published: Oct 8, 2014 by The PISM Authors
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.
For the PISM user this paper is an indication of its ability to model an ice sheet region (hashed in figure) at high resolution across a range of ice dynamics parameters and climate forcing choices.
This Science Daily news item quotes the authors about this work.