Controlling mechanisms of Thwaites Glacier, West Antarctica

Ice shelves play a major role in the stability of fast flowing ice streams in Antarctica, by exerting buttressing on inland ice and controlling the discharge of ice into the ocean. However, the mechanisms at work remain poorly understood and interactions between floating and grounded ice need to be better characterized in order to estimate the impact of climate change on the ice sheets. Thwaites glacier, in West Antarctica, features a small and heavily fractured ice shelf that provides limited back stress pressure on inland ice but is pinned on the eastern part on a prominent ridge. Thwaites glacier has maintained a consistently high velocity and negative mass balance for at least 20 years. Recent observations show a widening of its fast flowing area as well as a sustained acceleration since 2006 and a rapid retreat of its grounding line in the center of the glacier. The objective of this work is to characterize the dynamic response of Thwaites glacier to changes in its floating tongue on decadal to centennial time scales. To achieve this objective, we rely on high resolution ice flow modeling and grounding line dynamics using the Ice Sheet System Model (ISSM). We will focus on the complex interplay between the main floating tongue of Thwaites Glacier and its eastern, slow moving ice shelf, which is pinned down by an ice rumple. The speed of the eastern ice shelf is strongly affected by the coupling with the main floating ice tongue, which results in significant fluctuations in speed of the eastern ice shelf the formation of ice shelf cracks at the grounding line during acceleration phases. Our results show that ice rigidity at the junction between the eastern and western part of the shelf controls the dynamic regime of the ice shelf and suggest that Thwaites Glacier is likely to undergo substantial changes in the coming decades. This work was performed at the California Institute of Technology's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the University of California Irvine under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Cryospheric Sciences and Modeling, Analysis and Prediction Programs