AISS - Antarctic Ice Shelves Stability - Modelling ice-ocean interactions to reduce uncertainties in sea level rise projections

In Antarctica, floating ice shelves, at the margin of the ice sheet, have a critical buttressing effect and their ungoing destabilisation has global implications for future climate and sea level rise. Before they collapse, they can accumulate damage leading to increased surface and basal crevasses, increasing roughness and drag, and may even disintegrate, breaking into ice mélange, similar to what has occurred in the Thwaites Western Ice Tongue in the Amundsen Sea. Additionally, they lose mass by sub-shelf melting caused by ocean warming, which has accelerated in recent decades.

Current ocean models are not able to distinguish the state of the ice beneath ice shelves assuming it is flat and the drag with the ocean is constant. Using a regional configuration of NEMO-4.2 in the Amundsen Sea, we examine the ice ocean processes involved and propose a way to parameterise them in future projections. The final goal is to use it in ice-ocean coupled models.

This is a postdoc project of Dorothée Vallot.