| Project Detail |
Predicting glacier ‘tipping points’: numerical ocean simulations integrating turbulence
Glaciers, large land-bound sheets of ice and snow, are sentinels of climate change, rapidly shrinking or disappearing. Their ice shelves, tongues of ice extending into the ocean, protect the ice on land from melting. As oceans warm, the ice shelves melt and collapse at a faster rate, removing this protection. Understanding of the dynamical interactions underlying these processes is limited yet urgently needed to help predict if tipping points will be crossed in this century – and when. With the support of the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions programme, the GLmelt project will bridge this gap by developing high-resolution large-eddy simulations focusing on near-grounding-line ocean regions between the land-bound glacier and its ice shelf.
Ice shelf melting and retreat are accelerating in polar regions because the warm off-shore waters are gaining greater access to the base of ice shelves. Warm waters have the potential of reaching the grounding line and thereby melting it causing the retreat of the full ice shelf, resulting in elevated rates of ice discharge into polar seas and sea level rise. The interconnection between ocean conditions, warming, and ice melting in ice-shelf cavities is poorly understood due to the paucity of observations and turbulence-resolving simulations. This knowledge gap hinders future projections of ice changes and makes it impossible to predict if and when tipping points will be crossed within the 21st century, as their timing critically depends on the details of ice-ocean interactions. GLmelt aims to fill the critical knowledge gap pertaining to the relationship between ice melting rate and ocean conditions by running numerical simulations capable of resolving turbulence. They focus on near-grounding-line regions where ice sheet sensitivity to ice melting is greatest. GLmelt objectives are:
1. Developing an open-source numerical model capable of resolving under-ice ocean dynamics near grounding lines
2. Investigating melt rate distributions considering a range of ice-shelf cavity configurations found in nature
3. Investigating how the characteristic melt rate distributions vary with problem parameters in quiescent ocean conditions
4. Quantifying the effect of long-shore currents
5. Organizing a workshop reviewing state-of-the-art knowledge in dynamical processes controlling basal ice melting and guiding practices in choosing melting parameterizations
GLmelt will enable the candidate fellow to deliver high-impact research outcomes to the research community, environmental policymakers, and the public while receiving high-quality training from world-leading institutes in hydrodynamic turbulence and polar sciences, which will help him secure a permanent research position. |
