Turbulent plumes from a glacier terminus melting in a stratified ocean

The melting of submerged faces of marine‐terminating glaciers is a key contributor to the glacial mass budget via direct thermodynamic ablation and the impact of ablation on calving. This study considers the behavior of turbulent plumes of buoyant meltwater in a stratified ocean, generated by meltin...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of geophysical research. Oceans 2016-07, Vol.121 (7), p.4670-4696
Main Authors: Magorrian, Samuel J., Wells, Andrew J.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Ablation
Brackish
Buoyancy
Computational fluid dynamics
Convection
Convection modes
Density stratification
Geophysics
glacial melt
Glacier melting
Glaciers
Ice
Ice calving
Ice melting
ice shelf
Ice shelves
Intrusion
Land ice
Marine
Mass budget
Melting
Melts
Meltwater
Ocean temperature
Oceans
Plumes
Salinity
Salinity effects
Scaling
Scaling laws
Stratification
stratified flow
Temperature
Temperature effects
tidewater glacier
Turbulence
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Summary:The melting of submerged faces of marine‐terminating glaciers is a key contributor to the glacial mass budget via direct thermodynamic ablation and the impact of ablation on calving. This study considers the behavior of turbulent plumes of buoyant meltwater in a stratified ocean, generated by melting of either near‐vertical calving faces or sloping ice shelves. We build insight by applying a turbulent plume model to describe melting of a locally planar region of ice face in a linearly stratified ocean, in a regime where subglacial discharge is insignificant. The plumes rise until becoming neutrally buoyant, before intruding into the ocean background. For strong stratifications, we obtain leading‐order scaling laws for the flow including the height reached by the plume before intrusion, and the melt rate, expressed in terms of the background ocean temperature and salinity stratifications. These scaling laws provide a new perspective for parameterizing glacial melting in response to a piecewise‐linear discretization of the ocean stratification. Key Points We model ice shelf and glacier terminus melting controlled by meltwater convection in the ocean We find scaling laws for ice melt in a linearly stratified ocean for use in parameterizations We determine the sensitivity of melt to ocean temperature and salinity, and ice shelf basal slope
ISSN:2169-9275
2169-9291
DOI:10.1002/2015JC011160