Article Dans Une Revue Nature Année : 2025

Ocean warming threatens the viability of 60% of Antarctic ice shelves

Résumé

The disappearance of ice shelves, the floating margins of the Antarctic ice sheet that restrain the ice flow into the ocean, would strongly accelerate the Antarctic contribution to sea-level rise. Their viability in a warming world has motivated a lot of work, strongly focussing on the influence of the warming atmosphere. Here we revisit the concept of ice-shelf viability in a holistic manner, taking into account mass loss due to both the atmosphere and the ocean to estimate when it becomes virtually impossible for the ice shelves to maintain their present-day shape. We show that, for a scenario remaining largely below 2°C of global warming, only one out of 64 ice shelves likely becomes non-viable by 2300. For a scenario reaching nearly 12°C of global warming by 2300, many ice shelves become non-viable once global warming exceeds 4.5°C, mainly due to an increase in ocean-induced melt. 26 ice shelves are likely non-viable by 2150, and 38 in 2300. Ice-sheet regions restrained by these 38 ice shelves represent a sea-level rise potential of 10 m. Our estimates are latest bounds for reaching non-viability and ice-shelf collapse could occur even earlier, in particular due to the synergy with hydrofracturing.

Fichier principal
Vignette du fichier
2023_Summer_Paper__-14.pdf (5.63 Mo) Télécharger le fichier
Origine Fichiers produits par l'(les) auteur(s)
Licence
DOI

Cite 10.5281/zenodo.13768758 Jeu de données Burgard, C., Jourdain, N., Mosbeux, C., Caillet, J., Mathiot, P., & Kittel, C. (2025). Data and scripts to reproduce figures from ‘Ocean warming threatens the viability of 60% of Antarctic ice shelves’ (Version v2) [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/ZENODO.13768758

data
DOI

Cite 10.5281/zenodo.13768758 Jeu de données Burgard, C., Jourdain, N., Mosbeux, C., Caillet, J., Mathiot, P., & Kittel, C. (2025). Data and scripts to reproduce figures from ‘Ocean warming threatens the viability of 60% of Antarctic ice shelves’ (Version v2) [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/ZENODO.13768758

data and code used to produce the analysis and the figures

Dates et versions

hal-05361601 , version 1 (12-11-2025)

Licence

Identifiants

Citer

Clara Burgard, Nicolas Jourdain, Cyrille Mosbeux, Justine Caillet, Pierre Mathiot, et al.. Ocean warming threatens the viability of 60% of Antarctic ice shelves. Nature, 2025, 647 (8088), pp.102-108. ⟨10.1038/s41586-025-09657-w⟩. ⟨hal-05361601v1⟩
1180 Consultations
46 Téléchargements

Altmetric

Partager

  • More