Collaborative Research: Under what Climate Conditions does the West Antarctic Ice Sheet Collapse?

The collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) would raise sea level by about three meters (10 feet). It is therefore critical to understand whether the WAIS will collapse under future climate change, and, if so, how quickly. One way to learn about how the ice sheet will respond to anthropogenic climate change is to understand how it responded to past warm periods.

It is very likely, for example, that the WAIS collapsed during the last interglacial period (130,000 to 116,000-years ago). This collapse is thought to be explained by warming of the Southern Ocean near the ice sheet edge, but the relationship between the climate of the last interglacial period and the local ocean conditions that may have led to WAIS collapse is not well understood.

In addition, it is unknown how much warmer the ocean must be to trigger widespread WAIS retreat. This project will use new modeling capabilities to understand the combined climate and ice sheet conditions necessary for WAIS collapse. The results will lead to improved estimates of the likelihood of substantial sea-level rise in the next few decades and the coming centuries.

This work aims to advance our understanding of the climate and ice sheet conditions that probably led to West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) collapse during the Last Interglacial (LIG), and to determine whether conditions for collapse are likely to be met in the coming centuries. Most simulations of the LIG Antarctic ice sheet have relied on a limited set of prescribed ocean heat fluxes, and the relationship between LIG climate conditions and the behavior of the WAIS has been explored almost exclusively with limited or no ice sheet-climate coupling.

This project will probe WAIS collapse uncertainties through new transient paleoclimate simulations with the Community Earth System Model (CESM2) coupled to the Community Ice Sheet Model (CISM), along with large ensembles of past and future ice-sheet modeling experiments. The experiments will include, for the first time in CESM, a dynamic Antarctic ice sheet co-evolving with a transient climate, to account for feedbacks associated with meltwater fluxes to the ocean, ocean warming under ice shelves, and the influence of ice-sheet topography on the regional atmospheric circulation.

The team will also run large ensembles of CISM-only experiments to explore the space of ice-sheet model parameters and climate boundary conditions that lead to WAIS disintegration. In this way, the project will evaluate as fully as possible the interacting climate and ice-sheet conditions that lead to WAIS collapse. This work improves on previous work by using (1) a relatively high-resolution ice-sheet model that better resolves grounding-line dynamics, (2) more realistic ice-sheet-atmosphere and ice-sheet-ocean coupling, and (3) a wider range of possible climate boundary conditions, sub-ice-shelf melting parameters, and ice-sheet physics.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.