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Grounding lines exist where land-based glacial ice flows on to a body of water. Accurately modelling grounding-line migration at the ice–ocean interface is essential for estimating future ice-sheet mass change. On the interior of ice sheets, the shores of subglacial lakes are also grounding lines. Grounding-line positions are sensitive to water volume changes such as sea-level rise or subglacial-lake drainage. Here, we introduce numerical methods for simulating grounding-line dynamics in the marine ice sheet and subglacial-lake settings. Variational inequalities arise from contact conditions that relate normal stress, water pressure and velocity at the base. Existence and uniqueness of solutions to these problems are established using a minimisation argument. A penalty method is used to replace the variational inequalities with variational equations that are solved using a finite-element method. We illustrate the grounding-line response to tidal cycles in the marine ice-sheet problem and filling–draining cycles in the subglacial-lake problem. We introduce two computational benchmarks where the known lake volume change is used to measure the accuracy of the numerical method.
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This content will become publicly available on November 19, 2025
Two-way coupling between ice flow and channelized subglacial drainage enhances modeled marine-ice-sheet retreat
Abstract. Ice-sheet models used to predict sea-level rise often neglect subglacial hydrology. However, theory and observations suggest that ice flow and subglacial water flow are bidirectionally coupled: ice geometry affects hydraulic potential, hydraulic potential modulates basal shear stress via the basal water pressure, and ice flow advects the subglacial drainage system. This coupling could impact rates of ice mass change but remains poorly understood. We develop a coupled ice–subglacial-hydrology model to investigate the effects of coupling on the long-term evolution of marine-terminating ice sheets. We combine a one-dimensional channelized subglacial hydrology model with a depth-integrated marine-ice-sheet model, incorporating each component of the coupling listed above, yielding a set of differential equations that we solve using a finite-difference, implicit time-stepping approach. We conduct a series of experiments with this model, using either bidirectional or unidirectional coupling. These experiments generate profiles of channel cross-sectional area, channel flow rate, channel effective pressure, ice thickness, and ice velocity. We discuss how the profiles shape one another, resulting in the effective pressure reaching a local maximum in a region near the grounding line. We also describe the impact of bidirectional coupling on the transient retreat of ice sheets through a comparison of our coupled model with ice-flow models that have imposed static basal conditions. We find that including coupled subglacial hydrology leads to grounding-line retreat that is virtually absent when static basal conditions are assumed. This work highlights the role time-evolving subglacial drainage may have in ice-sheet change and informs efforts to include it in ice-sheet models. This work also supplies a physical basis for a commonly used parameterization which assumes that the subglacial water pressure is set by the bed's depth beneath the sea surface.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2336328
- PAR ID:
- 10631837
- Publisher / Repository:
- EGU
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- The Cryosphere
- Volume:
- 18
- Issue:
- 11
- ISSN:
- 1994-0424
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 5301 to 5321
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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