Linear response of east Greenland's tidewater glaciers to ocean/atmosphere warming. ...
Predicting the retreat of tidewater outlet glaciers forms a major obstacle to forecasting the rate of mass loss from the Greenland Ice Sheet. This reflects the challenges of modeling the highly dynamic, topographically complex, and data-poor environment of the glacier-fjord systems that link the ice...
Main Authors: | , , , , |
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Format: | Article in Journal/Newspaper |
Language: | unknown |
Published: |
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
2018
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Subjects: | |
Online Access: | https://dx.doi.org/10.17863/cam.27848 https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/280477 |
Summary: | Predicting the retreat of tidewater outlet glaciers forms a major obstacle to forecasting the rate of mass loss from the Greenland Ice Sheet. This reflects the challenges of modeling the highly dynamic, topographically complex, and data-poor environment of the glacier-fjord systems that link the ice sheet to the ocean. To avoid these difficulties, we investigate the extent to which tidewater glacier retreat can be explained by simple variables: air temperature, meltwater runoff, ocean temperature, and two simple parameterizations of "ocean/atmosphere" forcing based on the combined influence of runoff and ocean temperature. Over a 20-y period at 10 large tidewater outlet glaciers along the east coast of Greenland, we find that ocean/atmosphere forcing can explain up to 76% of the variability in terminus position at individual glaciers and 54% of variation in terminus position across all 10 glaciers. Our findings indicate that (i) the retreat of east Greenland's tidewater glaciers is best explained as a ... |
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