Modelling the Impact of Surface Melt on Antarctic Ice Shelf Stability

漂浮的冰架调节着流向海洋的冰流，很容易受到大气和海洋变化的影响。在过去的几十年里，南极半岛许多冰架的解体与表面融化水的形成有关。最值得注意的冰架坍塌发生在2002年，当时观察到拉森B冰架坍塌前表面有大量融水湖覆盖，导致在短短几周内失去了20多倍于卡迪夫大小的冰块面积。这种坍塌会影响海洋循环和温度，并导致栖息地的丧失。冰架的丧失消除了它们对地面冰盖的支撑作用，过去曾导致观察到的冰川加速进入冰架，并相应地导致海平面上升。因此，了解冰架的表面水文学是可靠地预测未来海平面因冰盖融化而上升的关键的第一步。地表水文过程在冰盖和气候模型中的表现很差，尽管地表融水的产生和输送对冰架的稳定性很重要。因此，对气候变化下未来海平面上升的预测仍在一个数量级上存在差异。

Floating ice shelves modulate the flow of ice towards the ocean, and are vulnerable to changes in both the atmosphere and ocean. The formation of surface meltwater has been linked with the disintegration of many ice shelves in the Antarctic Peninsula over the last several decades. The most notable ice shelf collapse occurred in 2002, when significant meltwater lake coverage was observed on the surface of the Larsen B Ice Shelf before its collapse, resulting in the loss of an area of ice over twenty times the size of Cardiff over a period of just a few weeks. Such collapse can affect ocean circulation and temperature, and cause a loss of habitat. The loss of ice shelves removes their buttressing effect on the grounded ice sheet, which has in the past led to an observed acceleration of glaciers that previously fed into the ice shelves, and a corresponding rise in sea level. Understanding the surface hydrology of ice shelves is thus an essential first step to reliably project future sea level rise from ice sheet melt. Surface hydrology processes are poorly represented in ice sheet and climate models, despite the importance of surface meltwater production and transport to ice shelf stability. As a result of this, projections of future sea level rise under a changing climate still vary over an order of magnitude.