Response of Marineâ€Terminating Glaciers to Forcing: Time Scales, Sensitivities, Instabilities, and Stochastic Dynamics

• Main Authors: Robel, Alexander A., Roe, Gerard H., Haseloff, Marianne
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: unknown
• Published: American Geophysical Union 2018
• Subjects: glaciers; climate; ice sheet; stochastic; stability; ice stream; Greenland; Jeremy; Sergienko; Antarc*; Antarctica; glacier; Ice Sheet; Ice Shelf
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.1029/2018JF004709

Recent observations indicate that many marineâ€terminating glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica are currently retreating and thinning, potentially due to longâ€term trends in climate forcing. In this study, we describe a simple twoâ€stage model that accurately emulates the response to external forcing of marineâ€terminating glaciers simulated in a spatially extended model. The simplicity of the model permits derivation of analytical expressions describing the marineâ€terminating glacier response to forcing. We find that there are two time scales that characterize the stable glacier response to external forcing, a fast time scale of decades to centuries, and a slow time scale of millennia. These two time scales become unstable at different thresholds of bed slope, indicating that there are distinct slow and fast forms of the marine ice sheet instability. We derive simple expressions for the approximate magnitude and transient evolution of the stable glacier response to external forcing, which depend on the equilibrium glacier state and the strength of nonlinearity in forcing processes. The slow response rate of marineâ€terminating glaciers indicates that current changes at some glaciers are set to continue and accelerate in coming centuries in response to past climate forcing and that the current extent of change at these glaciers is likely a small fraction of the future committed change caused by past climate forcing. Finally, we find that changing the amplitude of natural fluctuations in some nonlinear forcing processes, such as ice shelf calving, changes the equilibrium glacier state. © 2018 American Geophysical Union. Received 9 APR 2018; Accepted 25 JUL 2018; Accepted article online 2 AUG 2018; Published online 19 SEP 2018. Source code and documentation of the twoâ€stage and flowline models used in this study are freely available as public repositories on GitHub: https://github.com/aarobel/. Thanks to Olga Sergienko, Martin Truffer, Jeremy Bassis, and Elisa Mantelli for helpful comments on the manuscript. ...