EGU25-13400, updated on 15 Mar 2025
https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu25-13400
EGU General Assembly 2025
© Author(s) 2025. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Dynamic ice sheet-ocean interactions in the Energy Exascale Earth System Model
Xylar Asay-Davis1, Carolyn Begeman1, Darren Engwirda2, Alexander Hager1, Trevor Hillebrand1, Matthew Hoffman1, Andrew Nolan1, Stephen Price1, Irena Vaňková1, and Jonathan Wolfe1
Xylar Asay-Davis et al.
  • 1Los Alamos National Laboratory, Solid Mechanics and Fluid Dynamics, Los Alamos, NM, United States of America (xylar@lanl.gov)
  • 2CSIRO, Hobart, Australia

Representing ice-shelf and ocean interactions in Earth system models (ESMs) has been challenging due to their coarse resolution and static ice shelf cavity geometries. Additionally, coupling techniques often struggle to conserve mass and energy across components. We have recently implemented new algorithms in the ocean component of the Energy Exascale Earth System Model to enable dynamic ice-ocean interactions within Antarctica’s ice-shelf cavities. These include a thin subglacial film below grounded ice, subglacial runoff into ice-shelf cavities, and ice shelf-ocean fluxes computed in the ESM’s coupler. Together, these three approaches will enable representation of dynamic ice-sheet and ice-shelf geometry as well as continuity between the subglacial hydrological system while conserving mass and energy. Here, we present ocean simulations that explore the capabilities separately and report progress toward integrating both. We explore the thin-film capability in an idealized ice-shelf cavity at 2 km resolution modeled on the ISOMIP+ domain and the coupling capability in a global domain containing all Antarctic ice shelves at 12 km resolution. All simulations feature active ice-shelf thermodynamics. In the idealized simulations, we compare ice-ocean boundary layer properties and ice-shelf melt distributions from simulations with continuous dynamics between grounded and floating ocean model regions to those with fixed grounding line representations. We explore the model’s ability to simulate grounding-line migration due to both large ice-sheet thickness changes and tidal motion. We show that with our thin-film approach, subglacial runoff can mix with ocean waters below grounded ice before crossing the grounding line. In the global simulations, we demonstrate the ability to prescribe both fixed and dynamic ice-shelf thickness and outline the next steps for integrating the thin-film approach in this configuration.

How to cite: Asay-Davis, X., Begeman, C., Engwirda, D., Hager, A., Hillebrand, T., Hoffman, M., Nolan, A., Price, S., Vaňková, I., and Wolfe, J.: Dynamic ice sheet-ocean interactions in the Energy Exascale Earth System Model, EGU General Assembly 2025, Vienna, Austria, 27 Apr–2 May 2025, EGU25-13400, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu25-13400, 2025.

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