Southern Ocean ice shelf melting in a warming climate

TL;DRAbstract

The Antarctic ice sheet loses mass at its fringes bordering the Southern Ocean. At this boundary, warm circumpolar water can override the continental slope front, reaching the grounding line through submarine glacial troughs and causing high rates of melting at deep ice-shelf bases. The interaction between ocean currents, continental bathymetry, and shelf hydrography is thus likely to influence future rates of ice loss. The evolution of basal loss in a warming climate is presented for ten Antarctic ice shelves, based on the output of two coupled ice–ocean models (BRIOS and FESOM) both forced by the IPCC-SRES E1 and A1B scenario-related atmospheric outputs of the HadCM3 and ECHAM5/MPIOM climate models. Projections of future ice shelf basal melting are similar with regard to the scenarios applied but differ substantially between the climate models used, with the HadCM3 output causing the most significant changes in continental shelf temperatures. All ice shelves face a possible increase

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