Dynamic regimes of the Greenland Ice Sheet emerging from interacting melt-elevation and glacial isostatic adjustment feedbacks

The stability of the Greenland Ice Sheet under global warming is governed by a number of dynamic processes and interacting feedback mechanisms in the ice sheet, atmosphere and solid Earth. Here we study the long-term effects due to the interplay of the competing melt-elevation and glacial isostatic adjustment (GIA) feedbacks for different temperature step forcing experiments with a coupled ice-sheet and solid-Earth model. Our model results show that for warming levels above 2 °C, Greenland could become essentially ice-free on the long-term, mainly as a result of surface melting and acceleration of ice flow. These ice losses can be mitigated, however, in some cases with strong GIA feedback even promoting the partial recovery of the Greenland ice volume. We further explore the full-factorial parameter space determining the relative strengths of the two feedbacks: Our findings suggest distinct dynamic regimes of the Greenland Ice Sheets on the route to destabilization under global warming – from recovery, via quasi-periodic oscillations in ice volume to ice-sheet collapse. In the recovery regime, the initial ice loss due to warming is essentially reversed within 50,000 years and the ice volume stabilizes at 61–93 % of the present-day volume. For certain combinations of temperature increase, atmospheric lapse rate and mantle viscosity, the interaction of the GIA feedback and the melt-elevation feedback leads to self-sustained, long-term oscillations in ice-sheet volume with oscillation periods of tens to hundreds of thousands of years and oscillation amplitudes between 15–70 % of present-day ice volume. This oscillatory regime reveals a possible mode of internal climatic variability in the Earth system on time scales on the order of 100,000 years that may be excited by or synchronized with orbital forcing or interact with glacial cycles and other slow modes of variability. Our findings are not meant as scenario-based near-term projections of ice losses but rather providing insight into of the feedback loops governing the "deep future" and, thus, long-term resilience of the Greenland Ice Sheet.

Updated GNSS velocity solution in the Nordic and Baltic countries with a semi-automatic offset detection method

In Fennoscandia, the Glacial Isostatic Adjustment (GIA) causes intraplate deformations that affect the national static reference frames. The GNSS-determined velocities are important data for constraining the GIA models, which are necessary for maintaining the national reference frames. The Nordic Geodetic Commission (NKG) has published a dense and consistent GNSS station velocity solution in 2019, and we present now an update of the solution covering additional 3.5 years of data. Undetected positional offsets are the main factor decreasing the accuracy of the velocity estimates. We developed a method for the semi-automatic offset detection to improve the quality of our solution. The results show that we could correctly detect 74% of the manually determined offsets, and the undetected offsets would have caused a median 0.1 mm/y bias in trend. The method pointed out some otherwise unnoticed offsets and will decrease the need for manual analysis in the future. The updated velocity solution especially improves the velocity estimates of the newly established stations and the quality of the velocity estimates in Baltic countries. The formal uncertainties estimated using the power-law plus white noise model were at a median of 0.06 and 0.15 mm/y for horizontal and vertical velocities, respectively. However, we concluded that the systematic velocity uncertainties due to the reference frame alignment were approximately at the same level.

Mid- to late-Holocene sea-level evolution of the northeastern Aegean sea

We combined biostratigraphical analyses, archaeological surveys, and Glacial Isostatic Adjustment (GIA) models to provide new insights into the relative sea-level evolution in the northeastern Aegean Sea (eastern Mediterranean). In this area, characterized by a very complex tectonic pattern, we produced a new typology of sea-level index point, based on the foraminiferal associations found in transgressive marine facies. Our results agree with the sea-level history previously produced in this region, therefore confirming the validity of this new type of index point. The expanded dataset presented in this paper further demonstrates a continuous Holocene RSL rise in this portion of the Aegean Sea. Comparing the new RSL record with the available geophysical predictions of sea-level evolution indicates that the crustal subsidence of the Samothraki Plateau and the North Aegean Trough played a major role in controlling millennial-scale sea-level evolution in the area. This major subsidence rate needs to be taken into account in the preparation of local future scenarios of sea-level rise in the coming decades.

An approach for constraining mantle viscosities through assimilation of paleo sea level data into a glacial isostatic adjustment model

Glacial isostatic adjustment is largely governed by rheological properties of the Earth's mantle. Large mass redistributions in the ocean-cryosphere system and the subsequent response of the visco-elastic Earth have led to dramatic sea level changes in the past. This process is ongoing and in order to understand and predict current and future sea level changes the knowledge of mantle properties such as viscosity is essential. In this study we present a method to obtain estimates of mantle viscosities by assimilation of relative sea level data into a visco-elastic model of the lithosphere and mantle. We set up a particle filter with probabilistic resampling. In an identical twin experiment we show that mantle viscosities can be recovered in a glacial isostatic adjustment model of a simple three layer earth structure consisting of an elastic lithosphere and two mantle layers of different viscosity. In two scenarios we investigate the dependence of the ensemblebehavior on the ensemble initialization and observation uncertainties and show that the recovery is successful if the target parameter values are properly sampled by the initial ensemble probability distribution. This even includes cases in which the target viscosity values are located far in the tail of the initial ensemble probability distribution. We then successfully apply the method to two special cases that are relevant for the assimilation of real observations: 1) using observations taken from a single region only, here Laurentide and Fennoscandia, respectively, and 2) using only observations from the last 10 kyrs.