Effect of sedimentation on ice-sheet grounding-line stability.
Sedimentation filling space beneath ice shelves helps to stabilize ice sheets against grounding-line retreat in response to a rise in relative sea level of at least several meters. Recent Antarctic changes thus cannot be attributed to sea-level rise, strengthening earlier interpretations that warming has driven ice-sheet mass loss. Large sea-level rise, such as the approximately 100-meter rise at the end of the last ice age, may overwhelm the stabilizing feedback from sedimentation, but smaller sea-level changes are unlikely to have synchronized the behavior of ice sheets in the past.
Alley
Richard B
RB
Department of Geosciences and Earth and Environmental Systems Institute, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA. rba6@psu.edu
Anandakrishnan
Sridhar
S
Dupont
Todd K
TK
Parizek
Byron R
BR
Pollard
David
D