West Antarctic Last Interglacial ice sheet collapse (WANT-ice) - Dynamics of the Antarctic Ice Sheet in the Last Interglacial and its implications for future sea level changes.

• Applicant: Professor Johannes Carl Roderick Sutter, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Atmospheric Science ; Palaeontology ; Physical Geography
• Term: from 2019 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 417975849

Widespread melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets led to a sea level rise of approximately 6-9 meter (Dutton et al., 2015) in the Last Interglacial (also known as Marine Isotope Stage 5e, ca. 125.000 years ago). It is noteworthy that this sea level rise occurred under a climate regime very similar to todays. Global surface temperatures were approximately 0.5-1.5C warmer than in pre-industrial times and almost indistinguishable from today (Turney and Jones, 2010; Hoffman et al., 2017). Considering the densely populated coastal regions worldwide, a multi-meter sea level rise within the next centuries would result in mass migration (Kopp et al., 2017) with severe effects on society. Despite this potential hazard, it is still unclear upon which climate-threshold critical instabilities will be triggered which lead to the irreversible loss of parts of the Antarctic Ice Sheets, in particular the vulnerable marine West Antarctic Ice Sheet.To identify the driving forces behind the current retreat of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (Konrad et al., 2018) and project its future trajectory, ice sheet modelling studies are necessary. In the scope of project WANT-ice, the stability of the Antarctic Ice Sheet during the Last Interglacial and into the future shall be investigated by means of 3D continental ice sheet modelling. For this purpose, the growth and retreat of the Antarctic Ice Sheet will be simulated for the last 130.000 years as well as for the next century and beyond. To minimise uncertainties of model-based sea level projections, a novel model-data intercomparison approach shall be employed, seeking outmodel configurations which match Antarctic deep ice core proxies and the current Antarctic ice sheet’s internal stratigraphy. Thus, we will be able to produce the first projection of the future Antarctic contribution to sea level constrained by the Antarctic paleo-climate ice core archive and stratigraphic record.

• DFG Programme: Research Fellowships
• International Connection: Switzerland
• Host: Professor Dr. Hubertus Fischer