TY - JOUR A1 - Mengel, Matthias A1 - Feldmann, Johannes A1 - Levermann, Anders T1 - Linear sea-level response to abrupt ocean warming of major West Antarctic ice basin JF - Nature climate change N2 - Antarctica’s contribution to global sea-level rise has recently been increasing1. Whether its ice discharge will become unstable and decouple from anthropogenic forcing2,3,4 or increase linearly with the warming of the surrounding ocean is of fundamental importance5. Under unabated greenhouse-gas emissions, ocean models indicate an abrupt intrusion of warm circumpolar deep water into the cavity below West Antarctica’s Filchner–Ronne ice shelf within the next two centuries6,7. The ice basin’s retrograde bed slope would allow for an unstable ice-sheet retreat8, but the buttressing of the large ice shelf and the narrow glacier troughs tend to inhibit such instability9,10,11. It is unclear whether future ice loss will be dominated by ice instability or anthropogenic forcing. Here we show in regional and continental-scale ice-sheet simulations, which are capable of resolving unstable grounding-line retreat, that the sea-level response of the Filchner–Ronne ice basin is not dominated by ice instability and follows the strength of the forcing quasi-linearly. We find that the ice loss reduces after each pulse of projected warm water intrusion. The long-term sea-level contribution is approximately proportional to the total shelf-ice melt. Although the local instabilities might dominate the ice loss for weak oceanic warming12, we find that the upper limit of ice discharge from the region is determined by the forcing and not by the marine ice-sheet instability. Y1 - 2016 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1038/NCLIMATE2808 SN - 1758-678X SN - 1758-6798 VL - 6 SP - 71 EP - + PB - Nature Publ. Group CY - London ER - TY - GEN A1 - Feldmann, Johannes A1 - Levermann, Anders T1 - Similitude of ice dynamics against scaling of geometry and physical parameters T2 - Postprints der Universität Potsdam : Mathematisch Naturwissenschaftliche Reihe N2 - The concept of similitude is commonly employed in the fields of fluid dynamics and engineering but rarely used in cryospheric research. Here we apply this method to the problem of ice flow to examine the dynamic similitude of isothermal ice sheets in shallow-shelf approximation against the scaling of their geometry and physical parameters. Carrying out a dimensional analysis of the stress balance we obtain dimensionless numbers that characterize the flow. Requiring that these numbers remain the same under scaling we obtain conditions that relate the geometric scaling factors, the parameters for the ice softness, surface mass balance and basal friction as well as the ice-sheet intrinsic response time to each other. We demonstrate that these scaling laws are the same for both the (two-dimensional) flow-line case and the three-dimensional case. The theoretically predicted ice-sheet scaling behavior agrees with results from numerical simulations that we conduct in flow-line and three-dimensional conceptual setups. We further investigate analytically the implications of geometric scaling of ice sheets for their response time. With this study we provide a framework which, under several assumptions, allows for a fundamental comparison of the ice-dynamic behavior across different scales. It proves to be useful in the design of conceptual numerical model setups and could also be helpful for designing laboratory glacier experiments. The concept might also be applied to real-world systems, e.g., to examine the response times of glaciers, ice streams or ice sheets to climatic perturbations. T3 - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Mathematisch-Naturwissenschaftliche Reihe - 564 KW - grounding line motion KW - full-stokes model KW - West Antarctica KW - sheet models KW - Pine Island KW - stream-B KW - shelf KW - flow KW - sensitivity KW - collapse Y1 - 2019 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-412441 SN - 1866-8372 IS - 564 SP - 1753 EP - 1769 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Feldmann, Johannes A1 - Levermann, Anders T1 - Similitude of ice dynamics against scaling of geometry and physical parameters JF - The Cryosphere : TC ; an interactive open access journal of the European Geosciences Union N2 - The concept of similitude is commonly employed in the fields of fluid dynamics and engineering but rarely used in cryospheric research. Here we apply this method to the problem of ice flow to examine the dynamic similitude of isothermal ice sheets in shallow-shelf approximation against the scaling of their geometry and physical parameters. Carrying out a dimensional analysis of the stress balance we obtain dimensionless numbers that characterize the flow. Requiring that these numbers remain the same under scaling we obtain conditions that relate the geometric scaling factors, the parameters for the ice softness, surface mass balance and basal friction as well as the ice-sheet intrinsic response time to each other. We demonstrate that these scaling laws are the same for both the (two-dimensional) flow-line case and the three-dimensional case. The theoretically predicted ice-sheet scaling behavior agrees with results from numerical simulations that we conduct in flow-line and three-dimensional conceptual setups. We further investigate analytically the implications of geometric scaling of ice sheets for their response time. With this study we provide a framework which, under several assumptions, allows for a fundamental comparison of the ice-dynamic behavior across different scales. It proves to be useful in the design of conceptual numerical model setups and could also be helpful for designing laboratory glacier experiments. The concept might also be applied to real-world systems, e.g., to examine the response times of glaciers, ice streams or ice sheets to climatic perturbations. Y1 - 2016 U6 - https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-10-1753-2016 SN - 1994-0416 SN - 1994-0424 VL - 10 SP - 1753 EP - 1769 PB - Copernicus CY - Göttingen ER -