A high-end sea level rise probabilistic projection including rapid Antarctic ice sheet mass loss

• Published in: Environmental Research Letters
• Main Authors: Dewi Le Bars, Sybren Drijfhout, Hylke de Vries
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: IOP Publishing 2017
• Subjects: sea level rise; antarctica; probabilistic projections; extreme pathways; high-end projections; Environmental technology. Sanitary engineering; TD1-1066; Environmental sciences; GE1-350; Science; Q; Physics; QC1-999; Antarctic; The Antarctic; Antarc*; Antarctica; Ice Sheet; Ice Shelves
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/aa6512; https://doaj.org/article/869d7e4014774464b22479e726d18329

The potential for break-up of Antarctic ice shelves by hydrofracturing and following ice cliff instability might be important for future ice dynamics. One recent study suggests that the Antarctic ice sheet could lose a lot more mass during the 21st century than previously thought. This increased mass-loss is found to strongly depend on the emission scenario and thereby on global temperature change. We investigate the impact of this new information on high-end global sea level rise projections by developing a probabilistic process-based method. It is shown that uncertainties in the projections increase when including the temperature dependence of Antarctic mass loss and the uncertainty in the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5) model ensemble. Including these new uncertainties we provide probability density functions for the high-end distribution of total global mean sea level in 2100 conditional on emission scenario. These projections provide a probabilistic context to previous extreme sea level scenarios developed for adaptation purposes.