Recent mass balance of polar ice sheets inferred from patterns of global sea-level change

Details Recent mass balance of polar ice sheets inferred from patterns of global sea-level change Recent mass balance of polar ice sheets inferred from patterns of global sea-level change

Feb 2001

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2001natur.409.1026m&link_type=abstract

Nature, Volume 409, Issue 6823, pp. 1026-1029 (2001).

Computer Science

74

Scientific paper

Global sea level is an indicator of climate change, as it is sensitive to both thermal expansion of the oceans and a reduction of land-based glaciers. Global sea-level rise has been estimated by correcting observations from tide gauges for glacial isostatic adjustment-the continuing sea-level response due to melting of Late Pleistocene ice-and by computing the global mean of these residual trends. In such analyses, spatial patterns of sea-level rise are assumed to be signals that will average out over geographically distributed tide-gauge data. But a long history of modelling studies has demonstrated that non-uniform-that is, non-eustatic-sea-level redistributions can be produced by variations in the volume of the polar ice sheets. Here we present numerical predictions of gravitationally consistent patterns of sea-level change following variations in either the Antarctic or Greenland ice sheets or the melting of a suite of small mountain glaciers. These predictions are characterized by geometrically distinct patterns that reconcile spatial variations in previously published sea-level records. Under the-albeit coarse-assumption of a globally uniform thermal expansion of the oceans, our approach suggests melting of the Greenland ice complex over the last century equivalent to ~0.6mmyr-1 of sea-level rise.

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