Effect of Sedimentation on Ice-Sheet Grounding-Line Stability

• 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

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.