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Response of a Marine Ice Sheet to Changes at the Grounding Line

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

C. J. Van der Veen
C. J. Van der Veen*
Affiliation:
Institute for Meteorology and Oceanography, State University Utrecht, Princetonplein 5, 3584 CC Utrecht, The Netherlands
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Abstract

A numerical model was designed to study the stability of a marine ice sheet, and used to do some basic experiments. The ice-shelf/ice-sheet interaction enters through the flow law in which the longitudinal stress is also taken into account. Instead of applying the model to some (measured) profile and showing that this is unstable (as is common practice in other studies), an attempt is made to simulate a whole cycle of growth and retreat of a marine ice sheet, although none of the model sheets is particularly sensitive to changes in environmental conditions. The question as to what might happen to the West Antarctic Ice Sheet in the near future when a climatic warming can be expecied as a result of the CO2 effect, seems to be open for discussion again. From the results presented in this paper one can infer that a collapse, caused by increased melting on the ice shelves, is not very likely.

Type
Research Article
Information
Quaternary Research , Volume 24 , Issue 3 , November 1985 , pp. 257 - 267
Copyright
University of Washington

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