The Greenland Ice Sheet is currently the largest single contributor to global sea level rise, with recent decades having been characterised by an acceleration of mass loss. The Northern sector of the Greenland Ice Sheet has been relatively understudied, but is also the sector containing several of the last remaining ice tongues in Greenland. If these floating ice tongues are lost, the associated reduction in buttressing has the potential to lead to large increases in velocities and mass loss. One such glacier is Ryder glacier which, in contrast to the nearby Petermann glacier, has been reasonably stable in recent decades. As such, this glacier was targeted during the Ryder 2019 expedition with Swedish Icebreaker Oden, leading to a wealth of data on its present-day setting and Holocene history. In conjunction with this observational data, the numerical Ice Sheet and Sea Level System Model (ISSM) is used to investigate both the controls on glacier behaviour since 1900 and the likely trajectory of Ryder glacier towards 2100 under different emissions scenarios. The key focus is on understanding under which circumstances Ryder glacier may lose its ice tongue and what the impacts of this are likely to be in terms of glacier dynamics and sea level rise contribution.
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Holmes et al. (2024) studied this question.
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