Modelling the behaviour of tidewater glaciers

Abstract

More than half of the annual mass transfer from whole cryosphere to the world's oceans occurs through calving. Uncertainties in predicting future sea level are partly caused by a lack of knowledge of the behaviour of calving glaciers. A better understanding of the factors that control the response of calving glaciers to climate change is needed to interpret the past or predict the future behaviour of these glaciers in a warmer climate. Over the past years, interest in the response of calving glaciers to climate change has increased considarably. Many bservational and modelling studies have been carried out to investigate the dynamics of the calving process and the associated response of the glacier terminus. It has been suggested that calving glaciers are inherently unstable showing a periodic advance and retreat that may be nearly independent of climate. The cycle of slow advance and rapid retreat of calving glaciers is mainly a function of fjord geometry, water depth at the glacier terminus, and sedimentation at the glacier front. Some other studies show that climate acts as a first-order control on the advance/retreat. Hence, the diverse behaviour of calving glaciers is a result of both internal dynamics and climate. In this thesis the dynamics of tidewater glaciers (temperate grounded calving glaciers) and the involved processes such as iceberg calving, basal sliding, and proglacial moraine bank are investigated. A numerical ice-flow model is developed, which simulates the rapid retreat and slow advance of tidewater glaciers very well. To construct a time-evolving numerical model that simulates the behaviour of calving glaciers, it is necessary to formulate realistic calving boundary conditions. Empirical studies provide two different calving schemes, the flotation and the water-depth model. We introduce two numerical ice-flow models using the water-depth and the flotation scheme. The results show that any model in which the loss of ice at the glacier front increases with water depth shows qualitatively the same behaviour when a submarine undulation is present in the basal topography. These models are applied to Breidamerkurjokull, a large tidewater glacier in Iceland. The results indicate that the flotation model is not capable of producing the observed glacier retreat into deep water very well, whereas the water-depth model reproduces a glacier evolution identical to observation.