Long-term stability of the Antarctic Ice Sheet
Date:
Poster presentation (session C51C - Modeling of the Cryosphere: Glaciers and Ice Sheets) at the AGU Fall Meeting 2019 in San Francisco (CA), USA.
Abstract
The Antarctic Ice Sheet stores enough freshwater to raise the mean elevation of the oceans by nearly 60 meters globally and is thus constituting by far the largest source of potential future sea-level rise. Even though presently observed rates of Antarctic sea-level contribution are comparatively low, this poses a serious threat to our world’s coastal populations, cultural heritage, and ecosystems on centennial and millennial time scales under global warming. So far it is not clear which processes dominate the stability properties of the Antarctic Ice Sheet in the long term. Using the thermomechanically-coupled shallow ice model PISM, we here investigate the long-term response of the Antarctic Ice Sheet to various levels of warming and present the continental ice-sheet hysteresis.