Quantifying the feedback between Antarctic meltwater release and subsurface Southern Ocean warming

Lambert, Erwin; Le Bars, Dewi; van der Linden, Eveline; Jüling, André; Drijfhout, Sybren

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/esd-16-1303-2025

Articles | Volume 16, issue 4

https://doi.org/10.5194/esd-16-1303-2025

© Author(s) 2025. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/esd-16-1303-2025

© Author(s) 2025. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 16, issue 4

Research article

|

11 Aug 2025

Research article |

| 11 Aug 2025

Quantifying the feedback between Antarctic meltwater release and subsurface Southern Ocean warming

Erwin Lambert, Dewi Le Bars, Eveline van der Linden, André Jüling, and Sybren Drijfhout

Data sets

Code and data supporting "Quantifying the feedback between Antarctic meltwater release and subsurface Southern Ocean warming" Erwin Lambert https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15094736

Projecting Antarctica's contribution to future sea level rise from basal ice shelf melt using linear response functions of 16 ice sheet models (LARMIP-2) (https://github.com/ALevermann/Larmip2020/tree/master/RFunctions) Anders Levermann et al. https://doi.org/10.5194/esd-11-35-2020

Short summary

Ocean warming around Antarctica leads to ice melting and sea-level rise. The meltwater that flows into the surrounding ocean can lead to enhanced warming of the seawater, thereby again increasing melting and sea-level rise. This process, however, is not currently included in climate models. Through a simple mathematical approach, we find that this process can lead to more melting and greater sea-level rise, possibly increasing the Antarctic contribution to 21st century sea-level rise by 80 %.