Model of Antarctica’s water uses discredited climate scenario to ‘enhance sea level forecasts’

Emperor penguins, Antarctica [image credit: USAF / Wikipedia]

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Emperor penguins, Antarctica [image credit: USAF / Wikipedia]

The problem here is the use of the notorious RCP 8.5 model scenario as a climate prediction tool, which has been widely rejected as not credible for scientific use. It should have been sidelined years ago but still keeps popping up, in this case linked to imagined sea level rise in future centuries. The researchers say their results are their ‘best approximation’ and claim future. The article summary even claims this research ‘will lead to more accurate projections of sea level rise’.
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Researchers have generated the first dataset of water flow beneath the entire Antarctic Ice Sheet, which will lead to more accurate projections of sea level rise, says Science Daily.

The team modeled Antarctica’s subglacial environment.

The dataset represents the researchers’ best approximation of what the water flow underneath the ice sheet might currently look like.

The results include numerous subglacial lakes developing below ice streams in both East and West Antarctica, and an extensive network of subglacial water channels that discharge large fluxes of water under many major glaciers.
. . .
“The water layer between the ice sheet and the bedrock is either entirely ignored in projections of sea level rise or modelers have to make an approximation as to what this layer should look like,” said Dr. Christine Dow, professor in the Faculty of Environment and Canada Research Chair in Glacial Hydrology and Ice Dynamics. “Now we’ve provided the dataset as a product so there’s no excuse any more for not including this really important aspect of ice behaviour.”

Studies that include this water layer in their models of glacier flow end up predicting much higher degrees of glacier melt and mass loss by the end of the century.

Full article here.
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Image: Emperor penguins, Antarctica [credit: USAF / Wikipedia]
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The study (here) introduction says:
Antarctica is the largest body of ice on the planet, and has the potential to raise global sea level several meters alone by the year 2,300 (Golledge et al., 2015). It is critically important to reduce the remaining uncertainties within modeled sea level rise projections. Current estimates are between 7.8 and 30.0 cm from Antarctica by the year 2100 under the RCP 8.5 scenario forcing (Seroussi et al., 2020). While various factors contribute to this range, significant uncertainties persist due to remaining knowledge gaps, including the role of subglacial hydrology. [bold added]