The role of ice-ocean interactions in the past evolution of the Greenland Ice Sheet
Assessing the response of the Greenland Ice Sheet (GrIS) to climate variations is crucial to understand its past and constrain its future evolution under a changing climate. On one hand, the evidence of atmospheric warming observed since the last century has strongly demanded a major understanding o...
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| Other Authors: | , |
| Format: | Doctoral or Postdoctoral Thesis |
| Language: | English |
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Universidad Complutense de Madrid
2019
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| Online Access: | https://eprints.ucm.es/id/eprint/55148/ https://eprints.ucm.es/id/eprint/55148/1/T41058.pdf |
| Summary: | Assessing the response of the Greenland Ice Sheet (GrIS) to climate variations is crucial to understand its past and constrain its future evolution under a changing climate. On one hand, the evidence of atmospheric warming observed since the last century has strongly demanded a major understanding of the sensitivity of the GrIS to atmospheric temperature variations, leading to extensive investigation of this topic in the past. On the other hand, only recent evidence connecting GrIS mass loss to warming North Atlantic waters has driven the attention to the potential role of a changing ocean on the GrIS evolution, an aspect that has been overlooked for a long time. Starting from this evidence, several studies have been dedicated to understanding the interactions between the current GrIS evolution and the surrounding ocean. However, although we are now aware that the ocean plays a non-negligible role in shaping the configuration of the present-day GrIS, many uncertainties remain about its role in the past. |
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