Some general ice berg research:
How icebergs really melt -- and what this could mean for climate change
Current models wrongly assume icebergs melt uniformly in warming oceans
Icebergs are melting faster than current models describe, according to a new study by mathematicians at the University of Sydney. The researchers have proposed a new model to more accurately represent the melt speed of icebergs into oceans.
Their results, published in Physical Review Fluids, have implications for oceanographers and climate scientists.
Lead author and PhD student Eric Hester said: "While icebergs are only one part of the global climate system, our improved model provides us with a dial that we can tune to better capture the reality of Earth's changing climate."
Current models, which are incorporated into the methodology used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, assume that icebergs melt uniformly in ocean currents. However, Mr Hester and colleagues have shown that icebergs do not melt uniformly and melt at different speeds depending on their shape.
"About 70 percent of the world's freshwater is in the polar ice sheets and we know climate change is causing these ice sheets to shrink," said Mr Hester, a doctoral student in the School of Mathematics & Statistics.
"Some of this ice loss is direct from the ice sheets, but about half of the overall ice loss from Greenland and Antarctica happens when icebergs melt in the ocean, so understanding this process is important.
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Co-author Dr Geoffrey Vasil from the University of Sydney said: "Previous work incorporating icebergs in climate simulations used very simple melting models. We wanted to see how accurate those were and whether we could improve on them."
Mr Hester said their models -- confirmed in experiment -- and the observations of oceanographers show that the sides of icebergs melt about twice as fast as their base. For icebergs that are moving in the ocean, melting at the front can be three or four times faster than what the old models predicted.
"The old models assumed that stationary icebergs didn't melt at all, whereas our experiments show melting of about a millimetre every minute," Mr Hester said.
"In icebergs moving in oceans, the melting on the base can be up to 30 percent faster than in old models."
The research shows that iceberg shape is important. Given that the sides melt faster, wide icebergs melt more slowly but smaller, narrower icebergs melt faster.
"Our paper proposes a very simple model that accounts for iceberg shape, as a prototype for an improved model of iceberg melting," Dr Vasil said.
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/02/210216133415.htm