Authors:

Henry Axon

Date Created:

Not specified

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About Paper:

Mass loss from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets contributes to sea level rise, and the rate of mass loss has accelerated in recent decades. Since 2003 the Greenland ice sheet has been losing approximately 200 billion tons of ice per year, while the Antarctic ice sheet has been losing around 118 billion tons per year. Climate variations also affect ice-sheet mass by driving changes in the flow of glaciers that discharge ice into the ocean. However, changes in ice flow take years to centuries to adjust across an ice sheet, making the response of a full ice sheet to climate change complex in space and time. Although recent mass loss from ice sheets is clear, it remains uncertain when and where the ice-flow effects of anthropogenic warming will statistically emerge from natural climate variability. To study the way that changes propagate through marine glacier responses, we used a numerical ice flow model and large ensembles of simulation to statistically estimate the impact of longer-term trends and variability across the spatial profile of a glacier. For the case of ocean warming, we find the clearest signal in ice-flow velocity emerges near but not directly at the terminus. In contrast, the thickness response is amplified more uniformly across the glacier and propagates inland even after the trend ends. Using these methods on increasingly realistic glacier geometries might be one way of projecting how a glacier might change in response to a noisy climate trend.

Source:

University of Oregon / 2026

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Co-authors:

Henry Axon