Evolution of a Coupled Marine Ice Sheet - Sea Level Model

An instability mechanism is widely predicted for marine ice sheets resting upon reversed bed slopes. In this case, ice-sheet thinning or rising sea level is thought to lead to irreversible retreat of the grounding line. Previous analyses of marine ice-sheet stability have considered the influence of a sea-level perturbation on ice-sheet stability by assuming a geographically uniform, or eustatic, change in sea level. However, gravitational and deformational effects associated with changes in the volume of grounded ice lead to markedly non-uniform spatial patterns of sea-level change. In particular, a gravitationally self-consistent sea-level theory predicts a near-field sea-level change of opposite sign, and an order of magnitude greater amplitude, than would be predicted assuming eustasy. In recent work (Gomez et. al., Nature Geoscience, 2010), we highlighted the potential importance of this stabilizing sea-level mechanism by incorporating gravitationally self-consistent sea-level changes into a steady state ice sheet model. We extend this earlier analysis to investigate the influence of this stabilization mechanism on the timescale of ice-sheet retreat by coupling a sea-level model valid for a self-gravitating, viscoelastically deforming Earth to a 1D, dynamic marine ice sheet-shelf model. The evolution of the coupled model is explored for a suite of simulations in which we vary the bed slope and the forcing that initiates retreat. We find that the sea-level fall at the grounding line associated with a retreating ice sheet acts to slow the retreat; in simulations with shallow reversed bed slopes and/or small initial forcing, the drop in sea level can be sufficient to halt the retreat. The rate of sea-level change at the grounding line has an elastic component due to ongoing changes in ice-sheet geometry, and a viscous component due to past ice and ocean load changes. When the ice-sheet model is forced from steady state, on short timescales (< ~500 years), viscous effects may be ignored and grounding-line migration at a given time will depend on the local bedrock topography and on contemporaneous sea-level changes driven by ongoing ice-sheet mass flux. On longer timescales, an accurate assessment of the present stability of a marine ice sheet requires knowledge of its past evolution. Finally, we end with a discussion of the first results of simulations in which post-glacial sea-level physics is coupled to a 3D, dynamic marine ice sheet-ice shelf model.