Glacial Inception on Baffin Island: The Interaction of Ice Flow andMeteorology
Name
cp-2018-5.pdf
Size
1.7 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
08125b794f25cb9aa2ed23b0b4d661e3
Author(s)
Birch, Leah
Tziperman, Eli
Cronin, Timothy Wallace
Date Issued
February 2018
Journal
Climate of the Past Discussions
Publisher
Copernicus GmbH
Citation
Birch, Leah et al. “Glacial Inception on Baffin Island: The Interaction of Ice Flow and Meteorology.” Climate of the Past Discussions (February 2018): 1–28 © 2018 Author(s)
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Over the past 0.8 million years, 100kyr ice ages have dominated Earth's climate with geological evidence suggesting the last glacial inception began in the mountains of Baffin Island. Currently, state-of-the-art global climate models (GCMs) have difficulty simulating glacial inception, possibly due in part to their coarse horizontal resolution and the neglect of ice flow dynamics in some models. We attempt to address the initial inception problem on Baffin Island by asynchronously coupling the Weather Research and Forecast model (WRF), configured as a high resolution inner domain over Baffin and an outer domain incorporating much of North America, to an ice flow model using the shallow ice approximation. The mass balance is calculated from WRF simulations, and used to drive the ice model, which updates the ice extent and elevation, that then serve as inputs to the next WRF run. We drive the regional WRF configuration using atmospheric boundary conditions from 1986 that correspond to a relatively cold summer, and with 115kya insolation. Initially, ice accumulates on mountain glaciers, driving downslope ice flow which expands the size of the ice caps. However, continued iterations of the atmosphere and ice models reveal a stagnation of the ice sheet on Baffin Island, driven by melting due to warmer temperatures at the margins of the ice caps. This warming is caused by changes in the larger-scale circulation that are forced by elevation changes due to the ice growth. A stabilizing feedback between ice elevation and atmospheric circulation thus prevents full inception from occurring.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.5194/CP-2018-5
