Ice-sheet retreat can halt temporarily during long phases of climate warming, a UK team including an expert from the University of Sheffield have revealed.
The team has found that the geometry of channels beneath the ice can be a strong control on ice behaviour, temporarily hiding the signals of retreat.
The findings, which provide the first simulation of past ice-sheet retreat and collapse over a ten thousand year period in Antarctica, shed new light on what makes ice stable or unstable and will help refine predictions of future ice extent and global sea-level rise.
Stephen Livingstone from the University of Sheffield’s Department of Geography said: "It is clear that today ice sheets are changing rapidly, but the future picture is less clear. By surveying former ice stream landscapes we can significantly improve models and understanding of ice-stream retreat."
The results of the new research from Durham University, the University of Sheffield, the University of Cambridge, and the British Antarctic Survey are published Geoscience.
Lead author, Stewart Jamieson, a glaciologist at the Department of Geography, Durham University, said: "Our research shows that the physical shape of the channels is a more important factor in controlling ice stability than was previously realised. Channel width can have a major effect on ice flow, and determines how fast retreat, and therefore sea-level rise, can happen."
Marine-based ice streams are the fast flowing arteries of ice sheets draining approximately 90 per cent of the ice that reaches the sea. They flow through large channels where the ice can move thousands of metres a year. According to scientists, the unpredictable nature of ice streams makes forecasting ice-sheet retreat extremely difficult. If ice streams speed up they can cause sea-level rise.
Satellite imagery from the last 20 years has led to advances in our knowledge of ice sheet stability and has shown that many ice streams are getting thinner and retreating because the ocean and climate are warming. The new research shows that ice behaviour over thousands of years can successfully be simulated in places where ice streams meet the sea.
The researchers looked at the landscape of the seafloor in Marguerite Bay, in the Antarctic Peninsula, and saw that during a rapid phase of recession 13,000 years ago, retreat paused many times. Using a computer model designed to work in situations of rapid change, they found they could reproduce the same pattern in a series of simulations. These showed that ice dragged on the sides of the channel more where it was narrow, causing retreat to slow and in places temporarily stop for decades to centuries before retreat continued.
Many ice streams are found in channels with beds that are below sea level and that deepen inland. Current theory suggests that ice loss can increase rapidly in deeper water, but the new findings show that channel width plays a crucial role and that narrow bottlenecks in the landscape beneath the ice can cause retreat to slow down.
