Sea-level changes at the LGM from ice-dynamic reconstructions of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets during the glacial cycles

• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 2001
• Subjects: Antarctic; East Antarctica; Greenland; The Antarctic; West Antarctic Ice Sheet; Antarc*; Antarctica; ice core; Ice Sheet; Ice Shelves
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.490.9639; http://adsc.gfz-potsdam.de/seal/pubs/Huybrechts_QSR_2002.pdf

New experiments were performed with three-dimensional thermomechanical models of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets to simulate their behaviour during the glacial cycles, to reconstruct their thickness and extent at the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), and to estimate their glacio-eustatic contribution to the global sea-level stand. The calculations used improved ice-dynamic and isostatic treatments, updated datasets on higher grid resolutions, and refined climatic treatments based on newly calibrated transfer functions between ice core records and climatic perturbations. Results are discussed from a reference run with standard parameters that is compared with available glacial-geological observations, and from a series of sensitivity experiments focusing on isostatic adjustment, thermomechanical coupling, climatic forcing, mass-balance changes, and basal melting rates and viscosity changes of Antarctic ice shelves. For the Antarctic ice sheet, we find that volume changes are closely linked with grounding line changes of the West Antarctic ice sheet. At the LGM, the grounding line extended close to the continental shelf break almost everywhere. Ice over central East Antarctica was generally thinner than today and varied mainly in accordance with accumulation fluctuations. For the Greenland ice sheet, melting is important only during interglacial periods and the most sensitive period concerns the size of the ice sheet during the Eemian. At the LGM, the Greenland ice sheet extended beyond the present coastline to cover at least the inner continental shelf and thinned by up to several hundred meters in central areas. For a plausible range of parameters, the experiments indicate that at the time of maximum sea-level depression (21 kyr BP), the Antarctic ice sheet contributed 14–18m to the sea-level