Written by Olivier Gagliardini.

Elmer/Ice and Ice2sea

GrIS FabienIn a paper under revision for The Cryosphere (paper under discussion at http://www.the-cryosphere-discuss.net/6/2789/2012/tcd-6-2789-2012.html), we investigate with Elmer/Ice how current ice loss of the Greenland Ice Sheet may endure over the next century. This relies on three essential developments: the complete solution of the full system of equations governing ice deformation; an unstructured mesh to usefully resolve outlet glaciers and the use of inverse methods to better constrain poorly known parameters using observations. We show that the modelled ice discharge is in good agreement with observations on the continental scale and for individual outlets. By conducting perturbation experiments, we find that increasing ablation tends to reduce outflow and on its own has a stabilising effect, if destabilisation processes maintain themselves over time, current increases in the rate of ice loss are likely to continue. This work was performed using HPC resources from GENCI-CINES and from the Grenoble University High Performance Computing centre. This work is a contribution to the ice2sea project.