Earth Sciences Commons^™

A Numerical Model Investigation Of The Role Of The Glacier Bed In Regulating Grounding Line Retreat Of Thwaites Glacier, West Antarctica, Michael Scott Waibel

Dissertations and Theses

I examine how two different realizations of bed morphology affect Thwaites Glacier response to ocean warming through the initiation of marine ice sheet instability and associated grounding line retreat. A state of the art numerical ice sheet model is used for this purpose. The bed configurations used are the 1-km resolution interpolated BEDMAP2 bed and a higher-resolution conditional simulation produced by John Goff at the University of Texas using the same underlying data. The model is forced using a slow ramp approach, where melt of ice on the floating side of the grounding line is increased over time, which gently …