Effect of Sedimentation on Ice-Sheet Grounding-Line Stability

Sedimentation filling space beneath ice shelves helps to stabilize ice sheets against grounding-line retreat in response to a rise in relative sea level of at least several meters. Recent Antarctic changes thus cannot be attributed to sea-level rise, strengthening earlier interpretations that warmin...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Science
Main Authors: Alley, Richard B., Anandakrishnan, Sridhar, Dupont, Todd K., Parizek, Byron R., Pollard, David
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:English
Published: American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) 2007
Subjects:
Antarctic
Antarc*
Ice Sheet
Ice Shelves
Online Access:http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1138396
https://www.science.org/doi/pdf/10.1126/science.1138396
Description
Summary:Sedimentation filling space beneath ice shelves helps to stabilize ice sheets against grounding-line retreat in response to a rise in relative sea level of at least several meters. Recent Antarctic changes thus cannot be attributed to sea-level rise, strengthening earlier interpretations that warming has driven ice-sheet mass loss. Large sea-level rise, such as the ≈100-meter rise at the end of the last ice age, may overwhelm the stabilizing feedback from sedimentation, but smaller sea-level changes are unlikely to have synchronized the behavior of ice sheets in the past.

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