Melting and freezing under Antarctic ice shelves from a combination of ice-sheet modelling and observations

• Published in: Journal of Glaciology
• Main Authors: JORGE BERNALES, IRINA ROGOZHINA, MAIK THOMAS
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Cambridge University Press 2017
• Subjects: Antarctic glaciology; basal melt; ice/ocean interactions; ice-sheet modelling; ice shelves; Environmental sciences; GE1-350; Meteorology. Climatology; QC851-999; Antarctic; The Antarctic; Antarc*; Ice Sheet; Ice Shelf; Ice Shelves; Journal of Glaciology
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.1017/jog.2017.42; https://doaj.org/article/d630a2cded13499dbd2e48eb90d92f0b

Ice-shelf basal melting is the largest contributor to the negative mass balance of the Antarctic ice sheet. However, current implementations of ice/ocean interactions in ice-sheet models disagree with the distribution of sub-shelf melt and freezing rates revealed by recent observational studies. Here we present a novel combination of a continental-scale ice flow model and a calibration technique to derive the spatial distribution of basal melting and freezing rates for the whole Antarctic ice-shelf system. The modelled ice-sheet equilibrium state is evaluated against topographic and velocity observations. Our high-resolution (10-km spacing) simulation predicts an equilibrium ice-shelf basal mass balance of −1648.7 Gt a−1 that increases to −1917.0 Gt a−1 when the observed ice-shelf thinning rates are taken into account. Our estimates reproduce the complexity of the basal mass balance of Antarctic ice shelves, providing a reference for parameterisations of sub-shelf ocean/ice interactions in continental ice-sheet models. We perform a sensitivity analysis to assess the effects of variations in the model set-up, showing that the retrieved estimates of basal melting and freezing rates are largely insensitive to changes in the internal model parameters, but respond strongly to a reduction of model resolution and the uncertainty in the input datasets.