B.: Assessment of the importance of ice-shelf buttressing to ice-sheet flow, Geophys

• Main Authors: T. K. Dupont, R. B. Alley
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Pine Island Glacier; West Antarctica; Antarc*; Antarctica; Ice Sheet; Ice Shelf; Pine Island
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.419.8188; http://www.seas.harvard.edu/climate/seminars/pdfs/DupontAlley2005.pdf

[1] Reduction or loss of a restraining ice shelf will cause speed-up of flow from contiguous ice streams, contributing to sea-level rise, with greater changes from ice streams that are wider, have stickier beds, or have higher driving stress. Loss of buttressing offsetting half of the tendency for icestream/ice-shelf spreading for an ice stream similar to Pine Island Glacier, West Antarctica is modeled to contribute at least 1 mm of sea-level rise over a few decades. These results come from a new, simple model that includes relevant stresses in a boundary-layer formulation, and allows rapid estimation of ice-shelf impacts for a wide range of configurations. Citation: Dupont, T. K., and R. B. Alley (2005), Assessment of the importance of ice-shelf buttressing to ice-sheet flow, Geophys. Res. Lett., 32, L04503, doi:10.1029/2004GL022024. 1.