Leveraging Community Partnerships to Predict and Communicate Coastal Responses to a Changing Greenland Ice Sheet

Across the Arctic, as glaciers and ice sheets retreat in the coming years, shallow environments and key marine habitats will change: sea level will rise in some places and drop dramatically in others. These sea level changes will be the combined response of the solid Earth (uplift or subsidence) and gravity field to changes in glaciers and ice sheets, and will impact infrastructure, fisheries, and navigation across Arctic coastal communities. Coastal communities both around Greenland and across the world will need to develop a framework for adapting to these changes that reflect their proximity to the changing ice and their local geologic setting. Due to the adjacent ice sheet, the signals of shallow water change in Greenland will be large - the Greenland GPS Network (GNET) has documented uplift rates up to 23 mm/yr and subsidence rates of 5 mm/year in the southwest.

The Greenland Rising project brings together a convergent team to focus on the natural, social, and built environment of Arctic communities proximal to a changing ice sheet. The joint US-Greenlandic team are focusing on four Greenlandic communities experiencing difference responses to the changing ice, with differing natural, social, and built environmental needs. Goals for each community are to deploy state of the art technologies to map the shallow water environment and habitats, develop data-informed models and projections of how sea level has responded to changing ice, and partner with local communities in both collecting the data needed to improve the sea level models and the baseline bathymetric mapping to identify hot spots for future change.

We will capitalize on GNET observations and new seismic models as inputs into data-informed GIA modeling. Results will improve present-day mass loss estimates from the Greenland ice sheet and the related global sea level signal, particularly the non-eustatic component along the US East coast and Europe. A collection of new tide gauge data will be designed and implemented by each of the four local communities to fill crucial gaps in sea level records around Greenland. The Greenland Rising project will have the broader impact of developing a template for empowering local communities in partnering in science and preparing communities around the Arctic to adapt to the forthcoming changes.