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Sensitivity of the Lambert-Amery glacial system to geothermal heat flux

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posted on 2023-05-19, 02:30 authored by Pittard, ML, Jason RobertsJason Roberts, Benjamin Galton-FenziBenjamin Galton-Fenzi, Christopher WatsonChristopher Watson
Geothermal heat flux (GHF) is one of the key thermal boundary conditions for ice-sheet models. We assess the sensitivity of the Lambert-Amery glacial system in East Antarctica to four different GHF datasets using a regional ice-sheet model. A control solution of the regional model is initialised by minimising the misfit to observations through an optimisation process. The Lambert-Amery glacial system simulation contains temperate ice up to 150 m thick and has an average basal melt of 1.3 mm a−1, with maximum basal melting of 504 mm a−1. The simulations which use a relatively high GHF compared to the control solution increase the volume and area of temperate ice, which causes higher surface velocities at higher elevations, which leads to the advance of the grounding line. The grounding line advance leads to changes in the local flow configuration, which dominates the changes within the glacial system. To investigate the difference in spatial patterns within the geothermal datasets, they were scaled to have the same median value. These scaled GHF simulations showed that the ice flow was most sensitive to the spatial variation in the underlying GHF near the ice divides and on the edges of the ice streams.

History

Publication title

Annals of Glaciology

Volume

57

Issue

73

Pagination

56-68

ISSN

0260-3055

Department/School

Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies

Publisher

Int Glaciol Soc

Place of publication

Lensfield Rd, Cambridge, England, Cb2 1Er

Rights statement

Copyright 2016 The Authors. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Repository Status

  • Open

Socio-economic Objectives

Effects of climate change on Antarctic and sub-Antarctic environments (excl. social impacts)

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