Calving Dynamics and ice shelf damage
Warmer ocean waters trigger ice-front retreats of marine-terminating glaciers, and the corresponding loss in resistive stress leads to glacier acceleration and thinning. We have implemented a level-set based method to track moving boundaries within our ice sheet model. We also developed a new calving law based on tensile stresses (see Morlighem et al. 2016), but more work is needed to find a universal calving law, the holy grail of glaciologists…
In Antarctica, Larsen A and Larsen B have collapsed, and we are working on better understanding the evolution of damage of large ice shelves, what triggers ice shelf collapse and how to model ice shelf desintegration.