Century-scale relative sea-level changes in West Greenland — A plausibility study to assess contributions from the cryosphere and the ocean

Wake, Leanne; Milne, Glenn A.; Long, Antony J.; Woodroffe, Sarah A.; Simpson, Matthew; Huybrechts, Philippe

doi:10.1016/j.epsl.2011.09.029

Cited by 7 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…The Antarctic ice sheet could make a long-term contribution outside these limits if there had also been other long-term contributions in previous centuries. There are few model studies of thermal expansion during the last millennium (e.g., Gregory et al 2006;von Storch et al 2008), and we should be cautious about long-term trends from these experiments because they may be affected by slow adjustment to volcanic forcing (Gregory 2010 Wake et al 2012). It is likely that this inflexion was mainly caused by changes in the mass balance of the Greenland ice sheet in the sense of increasing mass loss (toward a more positive contribution to GMSLR).…”

Section: E Constraints On the Budgetmentioning

confidence: 99%

Twentieth-Century Global-Mean Sea Level Rise: Is the Whole Greater than the Sum of the Parts?

et al. 2013

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Confidence in projections of global-mean sea level rise (GMSLR) depends on an ability to account for GMSLR during the twentieth century. There are contributions from ocean thermal expansion, mass loss from glaciers and ice sheets, groundwater extraction, and reservoir impoundment. Progress has been made toward solving the ''enigma'' of twentieth-century GMSLR, which is that the observed GMSLR has previously been found to exceed the sum of estimated contributions, especially for the earlier decades. The authors propose the following: thermal expansion simulated by climate models may previously have been underestimated because of their not including volcanic forcing in their control state; the rate of glacier mass loss was larger than previously estimated and was not smaller in the first half than in the second half of the century; the Greenland ice sheet could have made a positive contribution throughout the century; and groundwater depletion and reservoir impoundment, which are of opposite sign, may have been approximately equal in magnitude. It is possible to reconstruct the time series of GMSLR from the quantified contributions, apart from a constant residual term, which is small enough to be explained as a long-term contribution from the Antarctic ice sheet. The reconstructions account for the observation that the rate of GMSLR was not much larger during the last 50 years than during the twentieth century as a whole, despite the increasing anthropogenic forcing. Semiempirical methods for projecting GMSLR depend on the existence of a relationship between global climate change and the rate of GMSLR, but the implication of the authors' closure of the budget is that such a relationship is weak or absent during the twentieth century.

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