Publication Date:
2018-02-08
Description:
East Antarctic Ice Sheet (EAIS) mass balance is largely driven by snowfall. Recently, increased snowfall in Queen Maud Land led to years of EAIS mass gain. It is difficult to determine whether these years of enhanced snowfall are anomalous or part of a longer-term trend, reducing our ability to assess the mitigating impact of snowfall on sea level rise. We determine that the recent snowfall increases in western Queen Maud Land (QML) are part of a long-term trend (+5.2 ± 3.7% decade−1) and are unprecedented over the past two millennia. Warming between 1998 and 2016 is significant and rapid (+1.1 ± 0.7°C decade−1). Using these observations, we determine that the current accumulation and temperature increases in QML from an ensemble of global climate simulations are too low, which suggests that projections of the QML contribution to sea level rise are potentially overestimated with a reduced mitigating impact of enhanced snowfall in a warming world. © 2017. American Geophysical Union. All Rights Reserved. This article has been contributed to by US Government employees and their work is in the public domain in the USA.
Print ISSN:
0094-8276
Electronic ISSN:
1944-8007
Topics:
Geosciences
,
Physics
Permalink