Glacier calving in Greenland
Abstract
In combination, the breakaway of icebergs (calving) and submarine melting at marineterminating glaciers account for between one third and one half of the mass annually discharged from the Greenland Ice Sheet into the ocean. These ice losses are increasing due to glacier acceleration and retreat, largely in response to increased heat flux from the oceans. Behaviour of Greenland's marine-terminating ('tidewater') glaciers is strongly influenced by fjord bathymetry, particularly the presence of 'pinning points' (narrow or shallow parts of fjords that encourage stability) and over-deepened basins (that encourage rapid retreat). Despite the importance of calving and submarine melting, and significant advances in monitoring and understanding key processes, it is not yet possible to predict the tidewater glacier response to climatic and oceanic forcing with any confidence. The simple calving laws required for ice sheet models do not adequately represent the complexity of calving processes. New detailed process models, however, are increasing our understanding of the key processes and are guiding the design of improved calving laws. There is thus some prospect of reaching the elusive goal of accurately predicting future tidewater glacier behaviour and associated rates of sea-level rise.
Citation
Benn , D I , Cowton , T , Todd , J & Luckman , A 2017 , ' Glacier calving in Greenland ' , Current Climate Change Reports , vol. 3 , no. 4 , pp. 282-290 . https://doi.org/10.1007/s40641-017-0070-1
Publication
Current Climate Change Reports
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
2198-6061Type
Journal item
Rights
© The Author(s) 2017. Open Access. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
Description
The authors acknowledge funding from NERC NE/P011365/1 CALISMO (Calving Laws for Ice Sheet Models)Collections
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