TY - JOUR
T1 - Global environmental consequences of twenty-first-century ice-sheet melt
AU - Golledge, Nicholas R.
AU - Keller, Elizabeth D.
AU - Gomez, Natalya
AU - Naughten, Kaitlin A.
AU - Bernales, Jorge
AU - Trusel, Luke D.
AU - Edwards, Tamsin L.
N1 - Funding Information:
Acknowledgements We acknowledge K. Buckley (Victoria University high-performance compute cluster), the Parallel Ice Sheet Model groups at University of Alaska, Fairbanks, the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and the CMIP community for making their data openly available. PISM is supported by NASA grants NNX13AM16G and NNX13AK27G. This work was funded by contract VUW1501 to N.R.G. from the Royal Society Te Aparangi, with support from the Antarctic Research Centre, Victoria University of Wellington, and GNS Science through the Ministry for Business, Innovation and Employment contract CO5X1001. N.G. was supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and the Canada Research Chairs programme. J.B. was supported by the MAGIC-DML project through DFG SPP 1158 (RO 4262/1-6). L.D.T. acknowledges support from the NSF Antarctic Glaciology Program (award 1643733).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2019, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited.
PY - 2019/2/7
Y1 - 2019/2/7
N2 - Government policies currently commit us to surface warming of three to four degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels by 2100, which will lead to enhanced ice-sheet melt. Ice-sheet discharge was not explicitly included in Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 5, so effects on climate from this melt are not currently captured in the simulations most commonly used to inform governmental policy. Here we show, using simulations of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets constrained by satellite-based measurements of recent changes in ice mass, that increasing meltwater from Greenland will lead to substantial slowing of the Atlantic overturning circulation, and that meltwater from Antarctica will trap warm water below the sea surface, creating a positive feedback that increases Antarctic ice loss. In our simulations, future ice-sheet melt enhances global temperature variability and contributes up to 25 centimetres to sea level by 2100. However, uncertainties in the way in which future changes in ice dynamics are modelled remain, underlining the need for continued observations and comprehensive multi-model assessments.
AB - Government policies currently commit us to surface warming of three to four degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels by 2100, which will lead to enhanced ice-sheet melt. Ice-sheet discharge was not explicitly included in Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 5, so effects on climate from this melt are not currently captured in the simulations most commonly used to inform governmental policy. Here we show, using simulations of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets constrained by satellite-based measurements of recent changes in ice mass, that increasing meltwater from Greenland will lead to substantial slowing of the Atlantic overturning circulation, and that meltwater from Antarctica will trap warm water below the sea surface, creating a positive feedback that increases Antarctic ice loss. In our simulations, future ice-sheet melt enhances global temperature variability and contributes up to 25 centimetres to sea level by 2100. However, uncertainties in the way in which future changes in ice dynamics are modelled remain, underlining the need for continued observations and comprehensive multi-model assessments.
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U2 - 10.1038/s41586-019-0889-9
DO - 10.1038/s41586-019-0889-9
M3 - Article
C2 - 30728520
AN - SCOPUS:85061145650
VL - 566
SP - 65
EP - 72
JO - Nature
JF - Nature
SN - 0028-0836
IS - 7742
ER -