Evaluation of four calving laws for Antarctic ice shelves

Abstract

Many floating ice shelves in Antarctica buttress the ice streams feeding them, thereby reducing the discharge of icebergs into the ocean. The rate at which ice shelves calve icebergs and how fast they flow determine whether they advance, retreat, or remain stable, exerting a first-order control on ice discharge. To parameterize calving within ice sheet models, several empirical and physical calving “laws” have been proposed in the past few decades. Such laws emphasize dissimilar features, including along- and across-flow strain rates (the eigencalving law), a fracture yield criterion (the von Mises law), longitudinal stretching (the crevasse depth law), and a simple ice thickness threshold (the minimum thickness law), among others. Despite the multitude of established calving laws, these laws remain largely unvalidated for the Antarctic Ice Sheet, rendering it difficult to assess the broad applicability of any given law in Antarctica. We address this shortcoming through a set of numerical experiments that evaluate existing calving laws for 10 ice shelves around the Antarctic Ice Sheet. We utilize the Ice-sheet and Sea-level System Model (ISSM) and implement four calving laws under constant external forcing, calibrating the free parameter of each of these calving laws for each ice shelf by assuming that the current position of the ice front is in steady state and finding the set of parameters that best achieves this position over a simulation of 200 years. We find that, in general, the eigencalving and von Mises laws best reproduce observed calving front positions under the steady-state position assumption. These results will streamline future modeling efforts of Antarctic ice shelves by better informing the relevant physics of Antarctic-style calving on a shelf-by-shelf basis.