[GWSG] PIG correction

[Tilley, Al]

Item 2 in today's newslist concerns a Nature article on the instability of the Pine Island Glacier.  In a communication entitled “not so fast” Ed Carter objects to my objection to the reading of the Nature article on the sea level rise contributions expected from PIG.  “I looked at the link on the PIG ice sheet retreat after your article 2.  It doesn’t say 3.5 mm per year. It says 3.5mm over 20 years.”   I revisited the article and own that he is right.  Here is a passage from the introductory summary of the Nature article on PIG:   “Here, using three state-of-the-art ice-flow models9, 10, 11, we show that Pine Island Glacier’s grounding line is probably engaged in an unstable 40 km retreat. The associated mass loss increases substantially over the course of our simulations from the average value of 20 Gt yr−1 observed for the 1992–2011 period4, up to and above 100 Gt yr−1, equivalent to 3.5–10 mm eustatic sea-level rise over the following 20 years. Mass loss remains elevated from then on, ranging from 60 to 120 Gt yr−1.”  I double checked on how much sea level rise comes from a gigaton of melt and Ed is the better reader by all accounts.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.unf.edu/pipermail/gwsg/attachments/20140117/41cd8b7f/attachment.html