IEDA
Project Information
Modeling Giant Icebergs and Their Decay
Start Date:
2018-07-01
End Date:
2021-06-30
Description/Abstract
Nearly half of the freshwater flux from the Antarctic Ice Sheet into the Southern Ocean occurs in the form of large tabular icebergs that calve off the continent’s ice shelves. However, because of difficulties in adequately simulating their breakup, large Antarctic icebergs to date have either not been represented in models or represented but with no breakup scheme such that they consistently survive too long and travel too far compared with observations. Here, we introduce a representation of iceberg fracturing using a breakup scheme based on the “footloose mechanism.” We optimize the parameters of this breakup scheme by forcing the iceberg model with an ocean state estimate and comparing the modeled iceberg trajectories and areas with the Antarctic Iceberg Tracking Database. We show that including large icebergs and a representation of their breakup substantially affects the iceberg meltwater distribution, with implications for the circulation and stratification of the Southern Ocean.
Personnel
Person Role
Wagner, Till Investigator and contact
Eisenman, Ian Co-Investigator
England, Mark Researcher
Funding
Antarctic Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences Award # 1744835
Antarctic Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences Award # 1744800
AMD - DIF Record(s)
Data Management Plan
None in the Database
Product Level:
NA
Datasets
Repository Title (link) Format(s) Status
USAP-DC Model of iceberg drift and decay including breakup Not Provided exists
Publications
  1. England, Mark R. and Wagner, Till J. and Eisenman, Ian "Modeling the breakup of tabular icebergs" Science Advances , v.6 , 2020 (doi:https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abd1273)
  2. Wagner, T. J. W., Straneo, F., Richards, C. G., Slater, D. A., Stevens, L. A., Das, S. B., & Singh, H. (2019). Large spatial variations in the flux balance along the front of a Greenland tidewater glacier. The Cryosphere, 13(3), 911–925. (doi:10.5194/tc-13-911-2019)
  3. Huth, A., Adcroft, A., & Sergienko, O. (2022). Parameterizing Tabular‐Iceberg Decay in an Ocean Model. Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems, 14(3). Portico. (doi:10.1029/2021ms002869)
  4. Wagner, T. J. W., Straneo, F., Richards, C. G., Slater, D. A., Stevens, L. A., Das, S. B., & Singh, H. (2018). Large spatial variations in the frontal mass budget of a Greenland tidewater glacier. (doi:10.5194/tc-2018-143)
  5. Wagner, T. J. W., Eisenman, I., Ceroli, A. M., & Constantinou, N. C. (2022). How Winds and Ocean Currents Influence the Drift of Floating Objects. Journal of Physical Oceanography, 52(5), 907–916. (doi:10.1175/jpo-d-20-0275.1)
  6. Castagno, A. P., Wagner, T. J. W., Cape, M. R., Lester, C. W., Bailey, E., Alves‐de‐Souza, C., York, R. A., & Fleming, A. H. (2023). Increased sea ice melt as a driver of enhanced Arctic phytoplankton blooming. Global Change Biology. Portico. (doi:10.1111/gcb.16815)
Platforms and Instruments

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