Melt sensitivity of irreversible retreat of Pine Island Glacier

In recent decades glaciers in the Amundsen Sea Embayment in West Antarctica have undergone substantial changes, including widespread retreat and acceleration. The subsequent mass loss caused the largest contribution to sea level rise from the entire Antarctic Ice Sheet. These changes have led to concerns about the stability of the region and the implications of future climate change. Recent modelling results show that one of the largest and fastest flowing of these glaciers, Pine Island Glacier (PIG), has already undergone an unstable and irreversible retreat in its recent history, when it detached from a subglacial ridge between the 1940s and 1970s.

Here we use the ice-flow model Úa to study the sensitivity of this retreat to changes in basal melting. We show that an intermittent increase in basal melting would have been sufficient to force PIG into a retreat from its stable position on the ridge. Once high melting begins upstream of the ridge, only near-zero melt rates can stop the retreat. Our results suggest that unstable and irreversible responses to warm anomalies are possible, and this can lead to substantial changes in ice flux over relatively short periods of only a few decades.