Cooperation between the Nordic countries and Japan in advanced ice sheet and glacier modeling

• Main Authors: Greve, Ralf, Zwinger, Thomas
• Format: Conference Object
• Language: English
• Subjects: 450; Canada; Greenland; Antarc*; Antarctica; Fennoscandian; glacier; glacier*; Ice cap; Ice Sheet
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2115/47648

An ice sheet is a grounded ice body with an area greater than 50,000 km2. The only current ice sheets on Earth are in Antarctica and Greenland, while during the maximum of the last glacial period about 21,000 years ago the Laurentide ice sheet covered much of Canada and North America, the Fennoscandian ice sheet covered northern Europe and the Patagonian ice sheet covered southern South America. Smaller grounded ice bodies, depending on their size, are termed ice caps or glaciers, their number exceed 100,000, and they exist on all continents. Ice sheets, ice caps and glaciers feature gravity-driven free surface flow (“glacial flow”), controlled by pressure, internal stresses, temperature and basal friction. Since the late 1970s, numerical modeling has become established as an important technique for the understanding of ice dynamics. Ice sheet, ice cap and glacier models are particularly relevant for predicting their possible response to climate change and consequent sea level rise, and thus a number of such models have been developed over the years. Recent observations actually suggest that ice dynamics could play a crucial role in predicting future sea level rise under global warming conditions. Despite this great relevance, ice sheet and glacier modeling is still heavily underrepresented within the domestic and international climatology communities, compared to the large efforts made into atmosphere and ocean research. The need for further research into the matter was even explicitly stated in the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC): “Dynamical processes related to ice flow not included in current models but suggested by recent observations could increase the vulnerability of the ice sheets to warming, increasing future sea level rise. Understanding of these processes is limited and there is no consensus on their magnitude.” (IPCC 2007). In this talk, recent and ongoing collaborative efforts between the Nordic countries (in particular Finland, ...