Hindmarsh, R. C. A. and E. Le Meur. 2001. Dynamical processes involved in the retreat of marine ice sheets. J Glaciol., 47(157), 271–282.

Hindmarsh and Le Meur (2001, p. 279) incorrectly stated that “the [ice-sheet] thinning associated with sea-level rise reported by Reference Alley and WhillansAlley and Whillans (1984) … is a numerical artefact”. Alley and Whillans did not directly model the effects of sea-level rise, instead they assumed that sea-level rise would cause grounding-line retreat and near-coastal thinning, and modelled the ice-sheet response to specified thinning near the new grounding-line position. That response — up-glacier propagation of thinning — is not a numerical artefact but is robust and should occur in other models. By avoiding the physical problem of grounding-line motion addressed by Hindmarsh and Le Meur (2001) , Alley and Whillans also avoided the potential numerical artefact identified by Hindmarsh and Le Meur.