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Portions of ice sheets grounded deep beneath sea level can disintegrate if tall ice cliffs at the ice-ocean boundary start to collapse under their own weight. This process, called marine ice cliff instability, could lead to catastrophic retreat of sections of West Antarctica on decadal-to-century time scales. Here we use a model that resolves flow and failure of ice to show that dynamic thinning can slow or stabilize cliff retreat, but when ice thickness increases rapidly upstream from the ice cliff, there is a transition to catastrophic collapse. However, even if vulnerable locations like Thwaites Glacier start to collapse, small resistive forces from sea-ice and calved debris can slow down or arrest retreat, reducing the potential for sustained ice sheet collapse.
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This content will become publicly available on August 23, 2025
The West Antarctic Ice Sheet may not be vulnerable to marine ice cliff instability during the 21st century
The collapse of ice shelves could expose tall ice cliffs at ice sheet margins. The marine ice cliff instability (MICI) is a hypothesis that predicts that, if these cliffs are tall enough, ice may fail structurally leading to self-sustained retreat. To date, projections that include MICI have been performed with a single model based on a simple parameterization. Here, we implement a physically motivated parameterization in three ice sheet models and simulate the response of the Amundsen Sea Embayment after a hypothetical collapse of floating ice. All models show that Thwaites Glacier would not retreat further in the 21st century. In another set of simulations, we force the grounding line to retreat into Thwaites’ deeper basin to expose a taller cliff. In these simulations, rapid thinning and velocity increase reduce the calving rate, stabilizing the cliff. These experiments show that Thwaites may be less vulnerable to MICI than previously thought, and model projections that include this process should be re-evaluated.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2152622
- PAR ID:
- 10580315
- Publisher / Repository:
- AAAS
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Science Advances
- Volume:
- 10
- Issue:
- 34
- ISSN:
- 2375-2548
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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