EGU24-17391, updated on 11 Mar 2024
https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu24-17391
EGU General Assembly 2024
© Author(s) 2024. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Critical thresholds of the Greenland Ice Sheet from the LGM to the future

Lucía Gutiérrez-González1, Jorge Alvarez-Solas1,2, Marisa Montoya1, Ilaria Tabone3, and Alexander Robinson4
Lucía Gutiérrez-González et al.
  • 1Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Facultad de Ciencias Físicas, Física de la Tierra y Astrofísica, Spain (lucgut03@ucm.es)
  • 2Instituto de Geociencias, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientifícas, Spain
  • 3Friedrich-Alexander-Universität, Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany
  • 4Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, Potsdam, Germany

In recent decades the Greenland Ice Sheet (GrIS) has undergone accelerating ice-mass loss. The GrIS is thought to be a tipping element of the Earth system due to the existence of positive feedbacks with the climate. Previous work has shown threshold behavior in the system, and its stability has been studied in a range of temperatures of the present to a global warming of +4K. However, there is still no consensus on the values of its critical thresholds for the future. Furthermore,  its stability at  lower temperatures hasn’t been studied yet. Here we use the ice-sheet model Yelmo coupled with the regional climate model REMBO and a parametrization of the ice-ocean interactions to obtain the bifurcation diagram of the GrIS from temperatures representative of the LGM (-12K) to a warmer scenario (+4K). The preindustrial simulated equilibrium volume is larger than the observations, a feature common to many other ice-sheet models. This could indicate model biases, but also that the GrIS could currently not be fully in equilibrium with the preindustrial forcing, with implications for future projections. To investigate this issue, we simulated the transient evolution of the GrIS since the LGM to the present day in the context of the bifurcation diagram, with equilibrium states acting as attractors. 

How to cite: Gutiérrez-González, L., Alvarez-Solas, J., Montoya, M., Tabone, I., and Robinson, A.: Critical thresholds of the Greenland Ice Sheet from the LGM to the future, EGU General Assembly 2024, Vienna, Austria, 14–19 Apr 2024, EGU24-17391, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu24-17391, 2024.