Thinning sea ice weakens buttressing force of iceberg mélange and promotes calving
- Creators
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Robel, Alexander A.
Abstract
At many marine-terminating glaciers, the breakup of mélange, a floating aggregation of sea ice and icebergs, has been accompanied by an increase in iceberg calving and ice mass loss. Previous studies have argued that mélange may suppress calving by exerting a buttressing force directly on the glacier terminus. In this study, I adapt a discrete element model to explicitly simulate mélange as a cohesive granular material. Simulations show that mélange laden with thick landfast sea ice produces enough resistance to shut down calving at the terminus. When sea ice within mélange thins, the buttressing force on the terminus is reduced and calving is more likely to occur. When a calving event does occur, it initiates a propagating jamming wave within mélange, which causes local compression and then slow mélange expansion. The jamming wave can also initiate widespread fracture of sea ice and further increase the likelihood of subsequent calving events.
Additional Information
© 2017 The Author. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Received: 09 August 2016. Accepted: 17 January 2017. Published online: 01 March 2017. I thank D. MacAyeal and D. Abbot for comments on the manuscript, V. Tsai, J. Amundson, J. Burton, B. Lipovsky, C. Horvat and W. Zhang for discussions, and I. Peters for providing the data. A. Herman provided timely and very helpful model support. All model simulations were performed on the Midway High Performance Cluster at the University of Chicago. Financial support was provided by the NOAA Climate and Global Change Postdoctoral Fellowship administered by the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research and the Caltech Stanback Postdoctoral Fellowship. Author Contributions: A.A.R. designed the study, devised and executed the mélange simulations, analysed the simulations and wrote the manuscript. Data availability: All code written by the author and used to run these simulations is available freely as a public GitHub repository at https://github.com/aarobel/melange-dem. LAMMPS-LIGGGHTS is a software package available publicly from the CFDEM project (http://cfdem.com) through an open-source licence. The DESIgn toolbox is available from the website of A. Herman (http://herman.ocean.ug.edu.pl/LIGGGHTSseaice.html). The author declares no competing financial interests.Attached Files
Published - ncomms14596.pdf
Supplemental Material - ncomms14596-s1.mov
Supplemental Material - ncomms14596-s2.mov
Supplemental Material - ncomms14596-s3.mov
Supplemental Material - ncomms14596-s4.pdf
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Additional details
- PMCID
- PMC5339875
- Eprint ID
- 74660
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20170301-181213591
- National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)
- Coco and Foster Stanback Postdoctoral Fellowship in Global Environmental Science
- Created
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2017-03-02Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2022-03-29Created from EPrint's last_modified field