The challenge of non-stationary feedbacks within the response of debris-covered glaciers to climate forcing
<p><strong>The challenge of non-stationary feedbacks within the response of debris-covered glaciers to climate forcing</strong></p><p>Debris-covered glaciers are a feature of many mountain ranges around the world and their proportion is expected to increase under continued climate warming.</p><p>The impact of debris cover on glacier behavior, via its profound modification of the glacier ablation regime, causes debris-covered glaciers to respond to the same climate forcing in a markedly different way to clean ice glaciers. In order to better understand how debris cover impacts the glacier&#8217;s response to climate forcing, we revisit the concept of steady state and examine it for a debris-covered glacier system. We present simple modeling results to explore how the development and evolution of debris cover affects the potential for steady-state and how feedbacks instigated by supraglacial debris cover complicate the glacier&#8217;s response to a prescribed steady climate. These investigations highlight the non-stationarity induced by the presence of debris and as a result, that debris cannot be considered as a static component, as it is a highly dynamic component which affects the glacier system in different ways.</p><p><br><br></p>