The stability of grounding lines on retrograde slopes

By G. H. Gudmundsson, J. Krug, G. Durand, L. Favier, O. Gagliardini. 2012

306 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The stability of marine ice sheets grounded on beds that slope upwards in the overall direction of flow is investigated numerically in two horizontal dimensions. We give examples of stable grounding lines on such retrograde slopes illustrating that marine ice sheets are not unconditionally unstable in two horizontal dimensions. Retrograde bed slopes at the grounding lines of marine ice sheets, such as the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS), do not per se imply an instability, nor do they imply that these regions are close to a threshold of instability. We therefore question those estimates of the potential near-future contribution of WAIS to global sea level change based solely on the notion that WAIS, resting on a retrograde slope, must be inherently unstable.

Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Pulmonary and Respiratory Medicine

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/eb0dafb074ddd3315b75deae55805bfdade9cee7

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In Atmospheric Science

In Pulmonary and Respiratory Medicine

Citations in the corpus

Antarctic sub-shelf melt rates via PICO (2017, background): “, the restraining force at the grounding line provided by the ice shelves (Thomas, 1979; Dupont and Alley, 2005; Gudmundsson et al., 2012), and can thereby accelerate upstream glacier flow.”
Marine ice-sheet profiles and stability under Coulomb basal conditions (2015, background): “…(except when the thickness gradient is small, as with ice plains, which can have surface slopes lower than 10−4), we will show that the transition to Coulomb behavior near the grounding line still results in significant modification of both the ice sheet profile and ice sheet stability criteria.”