The GRISLI-LSCE contribution to ISMIP6, Part 1: projections of the Greenland ice sheet evolution by the end of the 21st century

• Main Authors: Quiquet, Aurélien, Dumas, Christophe
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 2020
• Subjects: Antarctic; Arctic; Greenland; Antarc*; Antarctica; Global warming; Ice Sheet
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-2020-139; https://tc.copernicus.org/preprints/tc-2020-139/

Polar amplification will result in amplified temperature changes in the Arctic with respect to the rest of the globe making the Greenland ice sheet particularly vulnerable to global warming. While the ice sheet has been showing an increase mass loss in the past decades, its contribution to global sea level rise in the future is of primary importance since it is at present the largest single source contribution behind the thermosteric contribution. The question of the fate of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets for the next century has recently gathered various ice sheet models in a common framework within the Ice Sheet Model Intercomparison Project for CMIP6. While in a companion paper we present the GRISLI-LSCE contribution to ISMIP6-Antarctica, we present here the GRISLI-LSCE contribution to ISMIP6-Greenland. We show an important spread in the simulated Greenland ice loss in the future depending on the climate forcing used. The contribution of the ice sheet to global sea level rise in 2100 can be thus as low as 20 mmSLE to as high as 160 mmSLE. The CMIP6 models produce much larger ice sheet retreat than their CMIP5 counterparts. Low emission scenarios in the future drastically reduce the ice mass loss. The mass loss is mostly driven by atmospheric warming and associated ablation at the ice sheet margin while oceanic forcing contributes to about 10 mmSLE in 2100 in our simulations.