Abstract:

The Antarctic ice sheet flows from land into the sea where it begins to float. We call the floating portion the ice shelf and the ocean underneath the ice shelf cavity. Ocean driven melting of the ice shelf can destabilize the ice sheet upstream, leading to faster flow of the ice sheet into the ocean, which in turn, raises sea levels. A lack of theoretical understanding and ability to simulate the complex interactions between ice shelves and the ocean underneath contributes to meters of uncertainty in projections of sea level rise by 2300.

In this seminar I will present a novel theoretical framework which explains both the drivers of different regimes of ice shelf cavity circulations observed around Antarctica, and the fundamental dynamics of how all ice shelf cavities melt. I will demonstrate this theory’s success at discerning the regime of ice shelf cavities and predicting their melt rates in idealized simulations and in observations of real life ice shelf cavities. This theory may pave the way towards parameterizations of ice shelf basal melt which could be integrated into coupled global climate models.