Modeling ice front Dynamics of Greenland outlet glaciers using ISSM

Abstract:

The recent increase in the rate of mass loss from the Greenland Ice Sheet is primarily due to the acceleration and thinning of outlet glaciers along the coast. This acceleration is a dynamic response to the retreat of calving fronts, which leads to a loss in resistive stresses. These processes need to be included in ice sheet models in order to be able to accurately reproduce current trends in mass loss, and in the long term reduce the uncertainty in the contribution of ice sheets to sea level rise. Today, the vast majority of ice sheet models that include moving boundaries are one dimensional flow line and vertical flow band models, that are not adapted to the complex geometries of Greenland outlet glaciers, as they do not accurately capture changes in lateral stresses. Here, we use the level set method to track moving boundaries within a 2D plane view model of the Ice Sheet System Model (ISSM), and investigate the sensitivity of Store Glacier, in western Greenland, to the amount of melting occurring at its calving front. We explore different calving laws and obtain the best results with a new simple calving law adapted from von Mises yield criterion. We show that the ocean circulation near the front and the amount of runoff are able to trigger ice front advance and retreat depending on the amount of melting that they produce at the calving face, but the bed topography controls the stable positions of the ice front. The modeled calving front of Store Glacier, for which we have quality bed topography and sea floor bathymetry data, is particularly stable because of the presence of a large sill at the glacier terminus. If the ice front detaches from this stabilizing sill due to larger amounts of melting at the front or due to large calving events, the glacier front starts to retreat as the bed deepens inland, until it finds another stabilizing feature in the bed topography. The new bed topography maps based on mass conservation make it possible to model more accurately the behavior of Greenland outlet glaciers compared to other mapping techniques.