Ice sheet flow reacts to changes in topography produced by SMB change. Projections for the 21st century are given in Section 10.6.5 and Table 10.7, based on the discussion in this section. In Antarctica, topographic change tends to increase ice flow and discharge. In Greenland, lowering of the surface tends to increase the ablation, while a steepening slope in the ablation zone opposes the lowering, and thinning of outlet glaciers reduces discharge. Topographic and dynamic changes simulated by ice flow models (Huybrechts and De Wolde, 1999; van de Wal et al., 2001; Huybrechts et al., 2002, 2004; Gregory and Huybrechts, 2006) can be roughly represented as modifying the sea level changes due to SMB change with fixed topography by –5% ± 5% from Antarctica, and 0% ±10% from Greenland (± one standard deviation) during the 21st century.
The TAR concluded that accelerated sea level rise caused by rapid dynamic response of the ice sheets to climate change is very unlikely during the 21st century (Church et al., 2001). However, new evidence of recent rapid changes in the Antarctic Peninsula, West Antarctica and Greenland (see Section 126.96.36.199) has again raised the possibility of larger dynamical changes in the future than are projected by state-of-the-art continental models, such as cited above, because these models do not incorporate all the processes responsible for the rapid marginal thinning currently taking place (Box 4.1; Alley et al., 2005a; Vaughan, 2007).
The main uncertainty is the degree to which the presence of ice shelves affects the flow of inland ice across the grounding line. A strong argument for enhanced flow when the ice shelf is removed is yielded by the acceleration of Jakobshavn Glacier (Greenland) following the loss of its floating tongue, and of the glaciers supplying the Larsen B Ice Shelf (Antarctic Peninsula) after it collapsed (see Section 188.8.131.52). The onset of disintegration of the Larsen B Ice Shelf has been attributed to enhanced fracturing by crevasses promoted by surface melt water (Scambos et al., 2000). Large portions of the Ross and Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelves (West Antarctica) currently have mean summer surface temperatures of around –5°C (Comiso, 2000, updated). Four high-resolution GCMs (Gregory and Huybrechts, 2006) project summer surface warming in these major ice shelf regions of between 0.2 and 1.3 times the antarctic annual average warming, which in turn will be a factor 1.1 ± 0.3 greater than global average warming according to AOGCM simulations using SRES scenarios. These figures indicate that a local mean summer warming of 5°C is unlikely for a global warming of less than 5°C (see Appendix 10.A). This suggests that ice shelf collapse due to surface melting is unlikely under most SRES scenarios during the 21st century, but we have low confidence in the inference because there is evidently large systematic uncertainty in the regional climate projections, and it is not known whether episodic surface melting might initiate disintegration in a warmer climate while mean summer temperatures remain below freezing.
In the Amundsen Sea sector of West Antarctica, ice shelves are not so extensive and the cause of ice shelf thinning is not surface melting, but bottom melting at the grounding line (Rignot and Jacobs, 2002). Shepherd et al. (2004) find an average ice-shelf thinning rate of 1.5 ± 0.5 m yr–1. At the same time as the basal melting, accelerated inland flow has been observed for Pine Island, Thwaites and other glaciers in the sector (Rignot, 1998, 2001; Thomas et al., 2004). The synchronicity of these changes strongly implies that their cause lies in oceanographic change in the Amundsen Sea, but this has not been attributed to anthropogenic climate change and could be connected with variability in the SAM.
Because the acceleration took place in only a few years (Rignot et al., 2002; Joughin et al., 2003) but appears up to about 150 km inland, it implies that the dynamical response to changes in the ice shelf can propagate rapidly up the ice stream. This conclusion is supported by modelling studies of Pine Island Glacier by Payne et al. (2004) and Dupont and Alley (2005), in which a single and instantaneous reduction of the basal or lateral drag at the ice front is imposed in idealised ways, such as a step retreat of the grounding line. The simulated acceleration and inland thinning are rapid but transient; the rate of contribution to sea level declines as a new steady state is reached over a few decades. In the study of Payne et al. (2004) the imposed perturbations were designed to resemble loss of drag in the ‘ice plain’, a partially grounded region near the ice front, and produced a velocity increase of about 1 km yr–1 there. Thomas et al. (2005) suggest the ice plain will become ungrounded during the next decade and obtain a similar velocity increase using a simplified approach.
Most of inland ice of West Antarctica is grounded below sea level and so it could float if it thinned sufficiently; discharge therefore promotes inland retreat of the grounding line, which represents a positive feedback by further reducing basal traction. Unlike the one-time change in the idealised studies, this would represent a sustained dynamical forcing that would prolong the contribution to sea level rise. Grounding line retreat of the ice streams has been observed recently at rates of up to about 1 km yr–1 (Rignot, 1998, 2001; Shepherd et al., 2002), but a numerical model formulation is difficult to construct (Vieli and Payne, 2005).
The majority of West Antarctic ice discharge is through the ice streams that feed the Ross and Ronne-Filchner ice shelves, but in these regions no accelerated flow causing thinning is currently observed; on the contrary, they are thickening or near balance (Zwally et al., 2005). Excluding these regions, and likewise those parts of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet that drain into the large Amery ice shelf, the total area of ice streams (areas flowing faster than 100 m yr–1) discharging directly into the sea or via a small ice shelf is 270,000 km2. If all these areas thinned at 2 m yr–1, the order of magnitude of the larger rates observed in fast-flowing areas of the Amundsen Sea sector (Shepherd et al., 2001, 2002), the contribution to sea level rise would be about 1.5 mm yr–1. This would require sustained retreat simultaneously on many fronts, and should be taken as an indicative upper limit for the 21st century (see also Section 10.6.5).
The observation in west-central Greenland of seasonal variation in ice flow rate and of a correlation with summer temperature variation (Zwally et al., 2002) suggest that surface melt water may join a sub-glacially routed drainage system lubricating the ice flow (although this implies that it penetrates more than 1,200 m of subfreezing ice). By this mechanism, increased surface melting during the 21st century could cause acceleration of ice flow and discharge; a sensitivity study (Parizek and Alley, 2004) indicated that this might increase the sea level contribution from the Greenland Ice Sheet during the 21st century by up to 0.2 m, depending on the warming and other assumptions. However, other studies (Echelmeyer and Harrison, 1990; Joughin et al., 2004) found no evidence of seasonal fluctuations in the flow rate of nearby Jakobshavn Glacier despite a substantial supply of surface melt water.