Editors’ Highlights are summaries of recent papers by AGU’s journal editors.
Source: Geophysical Research Letters
Ice sheets are formed by the slow transformation of snow into ice. Large masses of ice, such as the Antarctic ice sheet, deform under their own weight and transport the ice from the interior of the continent to the coast, eventually breaking off and forming icebergs. The flow of ice is non-Newtonian, which means that its viscosity decreases as it deforms more. Recent research has shown that this effect may be even stronger than what current computer models use.
Getraer and Morlighem [2025] evaluate what the consequences of ice being an even more nonlinear material may be on its stability and contribution to sea level rise. The authors find that the sector of Thwaites glacier in West Antarctica would lose 32% more ice by 2100, and 70% by 2300. Current estimates of the future contribution of the ice sheets to sea level may therefore be strongly underestimated.
Citation: Getraer, B., & Morlighem, M. (2025). Increasing the Glen–Nye power-law exponent accelerates ice-loss projections for the Amundsen Sea Embayment, West Antarctica. Geophysical Research Letters, 52, e2024GL112516. https://doi.org/10.1029/2024GL112516
—Minghua Zhang, Former Editor-in-Chief, Geophysical Research Letters
Text © 2024. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
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