Modelling West Antarctic ice sheet growth and collapse through the past five million years

David Pollard () and Robert M. DeConto
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David Pollard: Earth and Environmental Systems Institute, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania 16802, USA
Robert M. DeConto: University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Massachusetts 01003, USA

Nature, 2009, vol. 458, issue 7236, 329-332

Abstract: When the ice sheet melted Changes in Earth's orbit are known to influence climate shifts from cold glacials to warm interglacials. How the vast West Antarctic ice sheet responds to these fluctuations is uncertain but, because its collapse could raise sea levels by about 5 metres, of great interest. Naish et al. have analysed the AND-1B ocean sediment core, extracted from beneath the Ross Ice Shelf as part of the ANDRILL drilling project, and find evidence that the ice sheet collapsed periodically during the early Pliocene (3-5 million years ago), when atmospheric CO2 levels were similar to, or slightly higher than today's. The pattern of collapse suggests an influence of approximately 40,000-year cycles in the tilt of Earth's rotational axis (obliquity). Also in this issue of Nature, in a numerical modelling study focused on the past 5 million years in Antarctica, David Pollard and Robert DeConto combine ice sheet (land-supported) and ice shelf (water-supported) modelling approaches to simulate the movement of the grounding line — the border between land and sea ice. Their results show that over the past 5 million years, the West Antarctic ice sheet transitioned between full, intermediate, and collapsed states in just a few thousand years. This means that the ice sheet is likely to disintegrate if ocean temperatures in the area rise by 5 C.

Date: 2009
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DOI: 10.1038/nature07809

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