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Abstract:
Marine sectors of the Antarctic Ice Sheet are prone to runaway retreat in a warming climate with global consequences. Observation and modelling-based studies suggest that these sectors have collapsed in the past and have the potential to contribute significantly to sea-level change in coming centuries, but the extent and timing of ice loss remains uncertain. Constraining ice cover changes in Antarctica is challenging because the solid Earth, water and ice systems are strongly linked, and key processes are often buried under the ice and take place on a range of spatiotemporal scales. To complicate matters, modern measurements of these systems contain a large signal from glacial isostatic adjustment (GIA) due to past ice mass changes, but Earth structure beneath areas of active ice sheet retreat in Antarctica is characterized by significant lateral variability, making the GIA signal challenging to constrain. This talk will summarize a progression of work bringing together the fields of glaciology, climate science and solid Earth geophysics to characterize the interactions between ice, sea level and the solid Earth in Antarctica and their implications for past and future global sea-level changes.
