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Abstract. Ice sheets lose the majority of their mass through outlet glaciers or ice streams, corridors of fast ice moving multiple orders of magnitude more rapidly than the surrounding ice. The future stability of these corridors of fast-moving ice depends sensitively on the behaviour of their boundaries, namely shear margins, grounding zones and the basal sliding interface, where the stress field is complex and fundamentally three-dimensional. These boundaries are prone to thermomechanical localisation, which can be captured numerically only with high temporal and spatial resolution. Thus, better understanding the coupled physical processes that govern the response of these boundaries to climate change necessitates a non-linear, full Stokes model that affords high resolution and scales well in three dimensions. This paper's goal is to contribute to the growing toolbox for modelling thermomechanical deformation in ice by leveraging graphical processing unit (GPU) accelerators' parallel scalability. We propose FastICE, a numerical model that relies on pseudo-transient iterations to solve the implicit thermomechanical coupling between ice motion and temperature involving shear heating and a temperature-dependent ice viscosity. FastICE is based on the finite-difference discretisation, and we implement the pseudo-time integration in a matrix-free way. We benchmark the mechanical Stokes solver against the finite-element code Elmer/Ice and report good agreement among the results. We showcase a parallel version of FastICE to run on GPU-accelerated distributed memory machines, reaching a parallel efficiency of 99 %. We show that our model is particularly useful for improving our process-based understanding of flow localisation in the complex transition zones bounding rapidly moving ice.more » « less
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Abstract High‐relief glacial valleys shape the modern topography of the Southern Patagonian Andes, but their formation remains poorly understood. Two Miocene plutonic complexes in the Andean retroarc, the Fitz Roy (49°S) and Torres del Paine (51°S) massifs, were emplaced between 16.9–16.4 Ma and 12.6–12.4 Ma, respectively. Subduction of oceanic ridge segments initiated ca. 16 Ma at 54°S, leading to northward opening of a slab window with associated mantle upwelling. The onset of major glaciations caused drastic topographic changes since ca. 7 Ma. To constrain the respective contributions of tectonic‐mantle dynamics and fluvio‐glacial erosion to rock exhumation and landscape evolution, we perform inverse thermal modeling of a new data set of zircon and apatite (U‐Th)/He from the two massifs, complemented by apatite4He/3He data for Torres del Paine. Our results show rapid rock exhumation recorded only in the Fitz Roy massif between 10 and 8 Ma, which we ascribe to local mantle upwelling forcing surface uplift and intensified erosion around 49°S. Both massifs record a pulse of rock exhumation between 7 and 4 Ma, which we interpret as enhanced erosion during the beginning of Patagonian glaciations. After a period of erosional and tectonic quiescence in the Pliocene, increased rock exhumation since 3–2 Ma is interpreted as the result of alpine glacial valley carving promoted by reinforced glacial‐interglacial cycles. This study highlights that glacial erosion was the main driver to rock exhumation in the Patagonian retroarc since 7 Ma, but that mantle upwelling might be a driving force to rock exhumation as well.more » « less
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