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EA-MISI provides a roadmap for a multi-year, international (European and extra EU), collaborative, scientific study of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet (EAIS) in George V Land (GVL) region.
In this region, the ice sheet mostly flows over a bed with a topography that slopes towards the continental interior and is mainly below sea level, namely, the Wilkes Subglacial Basin (WSB). This basin drains an ice volume equivalent to 4-6 metres of global mean sea level rise. Therefore, this sector is considered to have the potential to experience a marine ice sheet instability (MISI) if the ongoing warming of the Southern Ocean continues (IPCC AR5, Church et al., 2014), but the processes and relative importance of the mechanisms (drivers and feedbacks) that determine its sensitivity to both atmospheric and ocean warming are poorly constrained due to sparse direct observations.
The continental margin of GVL is about 800 km wide and the WSB extends for about 1000 km in the interior of the EAIS. Three major glaciers drain this sector of the EAIS from West to East: the Mertz, Ninnis and Cook Glaciers, respectively. They all have different characteristics and as such, react differently to climate change. Moreover, the adjacent continental shelf sea is one of the largest sources of Antarctic Bottom Water (AABW) formation. The amount of AABW likely fluctuated over the past glacial/interglacial cycles, thus impacting the global thermohaline circulation.
EA-MISI has established an internationally coordinated working group to study this complex region and has created a roadmap that spans more than a decade of modern and paleo observations and modelling. EA-MISI organised a series of meetings in 2023 and 2024, attended by more than two hundred scientists and stakeholders from nations interested in or already conducting multidisciplinary exploration of the WSB and GVL area, with the aim of presenting ongoing and future projects and discussing scientific priorities and potential collaboration.
The working group established a consensus list of key scientific questions to be addressed:
1.What are the topographic, bathymetric, glaciological and geological characteristics of the WSB and the GVL continental margin and what are the oceanographic conditions on the GVL continental margin that may influence the stability of the EAIS?
2.What has been the contribution of the EAIS in the WSB to global mean sea level fluctuations during past warm periods, when the ice sheet retreated as suggested by existing geological and glaciological archives?
3.How will the EAIS in the WSB respond to future ocean and atmospheric warming and how much and how fast will it contribute to global mean sea level rise over the next decades to centuries?
Answering these questions is critical for understanding the impact of current carbon emissions pathways in the short and long terms. There is, therefore, an urgent need to collect new observations of physical mechanisms and their interactions (ice sheet-atmosphere-ocean-lithosphere-biosphere) acting over a wide range of spatio-temporal scales (m to >100 km; diurnal to geological time scales). This will allow to analyse the critical processes determining the stability of the marine EAIS in the WSB, and ultimately to provide better understanding and numerical estimates of the past and future contribution to global mean sea level rise, abyssal ocean circulation, carbon cycle and ecosystem changes.
Such an integrated, multidisciplinary approach cannot be implemented by a single institution, organisation or country. The information collected by the EA-MISI service has been used to formulate the objectives of a new ERC Synergy Proposal focused on the Interplay of Ice, Ocean and Lithosphere in the WSB (ICEOLIA), led by the EA-MISI partners: Barruol, Colleoni, De Santis and Dutrieux. The proposal was rated very highly, but was not selected for funding. A resubmission is planned for the next ERC Synergy call in 2024.