Rise in melting rate of West Antarctic ice shelves may be unavoidable, finds new research

NEWCASTLE: The rate at which the warming Southern Ocean melts the Antarctic ice sheet will speed up rapidly over the course of this century, regardless of how much emissions fall in coming decades, our new research suggests. This ocean-driven melting is expected to increase sea-level rise, with consequences for coastal communities around the world.

The Antarctic ice sheet, the world’s largest volume of land-based ice, is a system of interconnected glaciers comprised of snowfall that remains year-round. Coastal ice shelves are the floating edges of this ice sheet which stabilise the glaciers behind them.

The ocean melts these ice shelves from below, and if melting increases and an ice shelf thins, the speed at which these glaciers discharge fresh water into the ocean increases too and sea levels rise.

In Antarctica, particularly the Amundsen Sea, this process has been underway for decades. Ice shelves are thinning, glaciers are flowing faster towards the ocean and the ice sheet is shrinking. While ocean temperature measurements in this region are limited, modelling suggests it may have warmed as a result of climate change.

Researchers chose to model the Amundsen Sea because it is the most vulnerable sector of the ice sheet. Researchers used a regional ocean model to find out how ice-shelf melting will change here. Researchers used the UK’s national supercomputer ARCHER2 to run many different simulations of the 21st century, totalling over 4,000 years of ocean warming and ice-shelf melting in the Amundsen Sea.

Researchers considered different trajectories for fossil fuel burning, from the best-case scenario where global warming is limited to 1.5 C in line with the Paris Agreement, to the worst, in which coal, oil and gas use is uncontrolled. Researchers also considered the influence of natural variations in the climate, such as the timing of events such as El Ni o.

The results are worrying. In all simulations there is a rapid increase over the course of this century in the rate of ocean warming and ice-shelf melting. Even the best-case scenario in which warming halts at 1.5 C, something that is considered ambitious by many experts, entails a threefold increase in the historical rate of warming and melting.

What’s more, there is little to no difference in the scenarios up to 2045. Ocean warming and ice-shelf melting in the 1.5 C scenario is statistically the same as in a mid-range scenario, which is closer to what existing pledges to reduce fossil fuel use over the coming decades would produce.

The worst-case scenario shows more melting than the others, but only from around mid-century onwards, and many experts think this amount of future fossil fuel burning is unrealistic anyway.

The results imply that researchers are now committed to rapid ocean warming in the Amundsen Sea until at least 2100, regardless of international policies on fossil fuels.

The increases in warming and melting are the result of ocean currents strengthening and driving more warm water from the deep ocean towards the shalloresearchersr ice shelves along the coast. Other studies have suggested this process is behind the ice shelf thinning measured by satellites.

Melting ice shelves are a major cause of sea-level rise, but not the whole story. Researchers can’t put a number on how much sea levels will rise without also simulating the flow of Antarctic glaciers and the rate of snow accumulating on the ice sheet, which our model didn’t include.

But researchers have every reason to believe that increased ice-shelf melting in this region will cause the rate at which sea levels are rising to speed up.

The Antarctic ice sheet is already contributing substantially to global sea-level rise and is losing about 80 billion tonnes of ice a year. It contains enough ice to cause up to 5 metres of sea-level rise, but researchers don’t know how much of it will melt, and how quickly.