A first constraint on basal melt-water production of the Greenland ice sheet
Abstract
The Greenland ice sheet has been one of the largest sources of sea-level rise since the early 2000s. However, basal melt has not been included explicitly in assessments of ice-sheet mass loss so far. Here, we present the first estimate of the total and regional basal melt produced by the ice sheet and the recent change in basal melt through time. We find that the ice sheet’s present basal melt production is 21.4 +4.4/−4.0 Gt per year, and that melt generated by basal friction is responsible for about half of this volume. We estimate that basal melting has increased by 2.9 ± 5.2 Gt during the first decade of the 2000s. As the Arctic warms, we anticipate that basal melt will continue to increase due to faster ice flow and more surface melting thus compounding current mass loss trends, enhancing solid ice discharge, and modifying fjord circulation.
Citation
Karlsson , N B , Solgaard , A M , Mankoff , K D , Gillet-Chaulet , F , MacGregor , J A , Box , J E , Citterio , M , Colgan , W T , Larsen , S H , Kjeldsen , K K , Korsgaard , N J , Benn , D I , Hewitt , I J & Fausto , R S 2021 , ' A first constraint on basal melt-water production of the Greenland ice sheet ' , Nature Communications , vol. 12 , 3461 . https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-23739-z
Publication
Nature Communications
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
2041-1723Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright © 2021 The Author(s). Open Access. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as 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. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.
Description
PROMICE is funded by the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (GEUS) and the Danish Ministry of Climate, Energy and Utilities under the Danish Cooperation for Environment in the Arctic (DANCEA), and is conducted in collaboration with DTU Space (Technical University of Denmark) and Asiaq, Greenland.Collections
Items in the St Andrews Research Repository are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.