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Originally published in Science Express on 1 March 2007
Science 30 March 2007:
Vol. 315. no. 5820, pp. 1838 - 1841
DOI: 10.1126/science.1138396
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Reports

Effect of Sedimentation on Ice-Sheet Grounding-Line Stability

Richard B. Alley,1* Sridhar Anandakrishnan,1 Todd K. Dupont,1,2 Byron R. Parizek,1,3 David Pollard1

Sedimentation filling space beneath ice shelves helps to stabilize ice sheets against grounding-line retreat in response to a rise in relative sea level of at least several meters. Recent Antarctic changes thus cannot be attributed to sea-level rise, strengthening earlier interpretations that warming has driven ice-sheet mass loss. Large sea-level rise, such as the {approx}100-meter rise at the end of the last ice age, may overwhelm the stabilizing feedback from sedimentation, but smaller sea-level changes are unlikely to have synchronized the behavior of ice sheets in the past.

1 Department of Geosciences and Earth and Environmental Systems Institute, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA.
2 Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL 60607, USA.
3 Department of Physics, The College of New Jersey, Ewing, NJ 08628, USA.

* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: rba6{at}psu.edu

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Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)